De La Salle University Publishing House (DLSUPH)
Catherine Belsey: In Conversation
Authors: Catherine Belsey and
David Jonathan Y. Bayot
Published and distributed by
De La Salle University (DLSU) Publishing House, 2013
ISBN 978-971-555-564-7
40 pages
What is literature, after Theory? What is the nature and purpose of literary and cultural criticism? Is cultural studies the alternative to literary studies? Are poststructuralism and feminism alive and well? In an age of deconstruction and difference, how valid is “aesthetics” as a paradigm for literary and cultural studies? Does the category of Truth (or truth) or Reality (or reality) or History (or history) have a place in 21st-century critical practice? What is the role of pleasure in the profession of literary and cultural studies? These are some of the questions addressed by Catherine Belsey in the interview with David Jonathan Bayot. This discussion — candid and provocative — is a helpful introduction to the ideas of a most significant voice in literary studies and cultural criticism today.
Catherine Belsey‘s work has always set out to challenge orthodoxies. Her latest book A Future for Criticism (2011) proposes for English departments a new direction that takes into account the role of pleasure and desire in the way we read. Her first book Critical Practice (1980, revised 2002) put to work the theories that were then arriving from Paris to redefine the discipline of criticism. In between, she has published The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (1985), John Milton: Language, Gender, Power (1988), Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden (1999), Why Shakespeare? (2007), and Shakespeare in Theory and Practice (2008), as well as Desire: Love Stories in Western Culture (1994), Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction (2002), and Culture and the Real (2005). Currently Research Professor in English at Swansea University, Belsey continues to value theory for what it enables cultural critics to do in practice — a valuation that is foregrounded in her forthcoming collection of critical essays, The Fictive Institution: Counterfactual Spaces and the Practice of Reading (De La Salle University Publishing House).
David Jonathan Y. Bayot is Associate Professor of Literature at De La Salle University and the series editor of De La Salle University Publishing House’s Critics in Conversation. His most recent book is an edited volume that brings together the most significant writings of a leading intellectual in Philippine literary and cultural studies – Salungat: A Soledad S. Reyes Reader (2012).