Catherine Belsey is a British literary critic who wrote the influential post-structuralist text Critical Practice. In it, she examines how texts construct readers as subjects by drawing on concepts from Lacan, Saussure, and Althusser. Belsey analyzes how ideology, the symbolic order, and the mirror stage influence subjectivity and how readers are positioned within texts. She brings insights from psychoanalysis and Marxist philosophy to literary theory in order to understand the relationship between readers and the social formations that texts represent.

2. ADDRESSING THE SUBJECT
-Catherine Belsey

3. Catherine Belsey is a British Literary Critic
 Visiting Professor of English at the University of
Derby
 Fellow of English Association – Fellow of Learned
Society of Wales
 Her work Critical Practice (1980), an influential
post structuralist text - suggests new directions
for literary studies.
 Also wrote about the effect of romance novels on
modern soiciety

4.  Criticized the traditional ways of criticism
 Made a scientific analysis of the techniques and
styles of the last century
 Other major works includes :
• Desire : Love Stories in Western Culture (1980)
• Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden: The
Construction of Family Values in Early Modern
Culture (1999)

5.  Taken from Critical Practice
 Belsey attempts to explain the process by which a
text constructs reader as its subject
 She works from general to specific
 Introduces the concept of Lacan’s ‘mirror image’,
Saussure’s ‘language as a system’ and Althusser’s
‘ideology’.
 She draws on Althusser’s concept of ideology to
explain how a reader is fixed in a particular
ideological position within a text

6.  How a reader is constituted as a subject by a text
 Analyses Lacan’s theory of mirror image as a
formative of the ‘I’
 Adding insights into ‘Resistance’, and‘Desire’
 Explains about the complementary relationship
between a reader and a text on lines of
subjectivity

7.  A set of ideas that determines one’s goals,
expectations and actions
 The word ‘Ideology’ coined by Destutt de Tracy in
1796 by fusing ‘idea’ and ‘logy’ to mean ‘’science of
ideas’’
 Marx defined ideology as a range of representations
related to the real relationships which people live
 Ideology is not simply a set of iluusions

8.  Ideology can’t be defined as a whole truth. It
presents partial truths
 It is a set of omissions, gaps, rather than lies,
appears to provide answers to questions
 Ideology has no creators
 According to Althusser, ideological practises are
produced and reproduced in the institutions of
our society – Ideological State Apparatuses, ISA

9.  The subject is what speaks or signifies
 Traditional sense of subject was ego or self
 Subject represents the individual’s self-consiousness
and consiousness of the self
 For post-structuralism the subject is rather
secondary, constructed by the language and volatile
 Language allows an individual to refer to himself as ‘I’
and everyone except him as ‘You’
 ‘I’ has a set of beliefs and practices which is at
variance with that of ‘You’

10.  Within ideology the individual speaker is the
origin of the meaning of his utterence
 According to Derrida language is not aa function
of speaking subject
 It implies that subject is inscribed in the language,
that it is a function of language

11.  Jacques Lacan,eminent French psychoanalyst
argues that subjectivity is not acquired, but
created
 He observes at the age of six, an infant has no
sense of identity :it is not able to distinguish itself
from others
 But between the age of six and eighteen months,
children became capable of recognising their
mirror image
 The subject is not static

12.  After the first stage of recognition, the child enters
the ‘symbolic order’
 To be a part of social formation, a child must have
recourse to language
 The child not only identifies itself as ‘I’ , but also as
‘he’ and ‘she’, ‘son’ or ‘daughter’, according to the
subject positions it happens to be in

13.  Ideology has the role of constituting individuals as
subjects, because it is produced in the identification
of ‘I’ of language
 It is not easy to come out of it
 To resist ideology means to refuse act or speak
 Ideology addresses concrete individuals as subjects
 It may be possible to resist ideology in a theoretical
level with a concept of ruling ideology that is by
protesting against it

14.  There is a distinction between the consious
subject represented in a speech and the subject
speaks
 In the gap formed we find unconsious- in the
moment of entry into the symbolic order
 It is the consiousness which repress human beings
in obedience to the discipline imposed by
language and culture
 Unconsiousness is the only source of disruption of
the obedience

15.  Once the child enters the symbolic order, it
overcomes its difficulty in the pre-linguistic stage
to vent its wants
 The acquisition of lanuage helps him to phrase his
desires
 Language satisfies the child’s wish to express its
desires
 It confines the wishes to those that can be
expressed through conventions of language

16.  For instance when a child says it wants a rose, the
rose it has in mind may be white in colour, though
it may get red.
 The concept of subject is constantly in the process
of construction and deconstruction
 Driven by the unconsious desire the subject is
restless, dissatisfied and eager to change
 This dissatisfaction leads to the possiblity of
transformation

17.  A reader in a way author also
 By interpreting the signs in a text in a personal
fashion every reader creates his own versions of
the same literary text
 Every reader brings his own aspirations and
dreams in the reading of a text
 The quality of our literary experience depends not
only on the text and on what the author offers
 But also depends on the releveance of padt
experience and presnet intersets that the reader
brings in

18. o Interpellation
A concept used in Marxist theory
Explains how individuals are constructed as
subjects by major social and political
institutions
Propounded by Louis Althusser in his Essays
on Ideology
No texts create a determinate meaning but
by social formation

19. o Classic Realism
The dominant literary form of the 19th
century
Subjectivity is the major theme of Classic
Realism
Inconsistency of character or the
inappropriateness of particular actions to
particular characters is seen as a weakness of
classic realism

20.  Catherine Belsey streches toeards an explicitly
philosophical approach to literary theory
 She works towards a pluralistic theory of
interpretation but her work is not a post modern
work
 She yokes together linguist theories, psychoanalysis
and Marxist philosophy
 Explains the interplay between a text, reader and the
social formation
 She succeede in uniting various disciplines in
analysing the literary texts