Summer Term: Session 2

Dangerous Dead Women and the Practice of Criticism

Professor Catherine Belsey
(Swansea University) 

Wednesday 16th May, 6-8pm
Senate House, Room 104 (First Floor) 

***PLEASE NOTE ROOM CHANGE***

From the Icelandic sagas to The Woman in Black, women may prove more menacing in death than they were permitted to be in life. Are ghost stories concerning the malevolent return of the oppressed best read as evidence of misgivings on the part of a misogynist culture? Or is a deeper anxiety perceptible? And how far are current critical practices open to a genre of fiction that registers a sense of something beyond what culture gives us to know?

 
Catherine Belsey is Professor of English at Swansea University. Her work and influence on the contemporary landscape of literary criticism is such that Textual Practice dedicated a Special Issue to her work (24:6, 2010). She is perhaps best known for her works Critical Practice (Routledge, 1980, 2002) and Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2002), but her extensive body of work encompasses such subjects as Tragedy, Desire, Milton, Shakespeare, Feminism, and Theory. Her most recent books include Culture and the Real: Theorizing Cultural Criticism (Routledge, 2005), Why Shakespeare? (Palgrave, 2007), Shakespeare in Theory and Practice (Edinburgh University Press, 2008), and A Future for Criticism (Blackwell, 2011), in which she proposes a new direction for critical practice that emphasises the pleasures of fiction and the way it engages readers. 

This is a free event. 

All are welcome to attend.

First Session: Introduction

Our introductory meeting will take place on Thursday 11^th February in Room GSB2, 2 Gower Street between 1 and 3pm, and we will discuss Catherine Belsey’s article “The Death of the Reader” (Textual Practice, Volume 23, Issue 2, April 2009, pp. 201-214). The article can be accessed online at Senate House Library from the computers provided and at most other libraries from the University of London. Hard copies should also be available.

The session’s focus will be on the following:

- Is the reader dead?

- “Critical biography is not an aid to reading but a substitute for it” (p. 212). Is this true?

- Are the “Death of the Author” and the “Death of the Reader” mutually exclusive?

- “Literature can be dangerous” (p. 203). Is reading a political act?