Culture and the real : theorizing cultural criticism

Bibliographic Information

Culture and the real : theorizing cultural criticism

Catherine Belsey

(New accents)

Routledge, 2005

  • : hbk
  • : pbk

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Note

Includes bibliographical references (p. [157]-168) and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

What makes us the people we are? Culture evidently plays a part, but how large a part? Is culture alone the source of our identities? Some have argued that human nature is the foundation of culture, others that culture is the foundation of human identity. Catherine Belsey calls for a more nuanced, relational account of what it is to be human, and in doing so puts forward a significant new theory of culture. Culture and the Real explains with Professor Belsey's characteristic lucidity the views of recent theorists, including Jean-Francois Lyotard, Judith Butler and Slavoj Zizek, as well as their debt to the earlier work of Kant and Hegel, in order to take issue with their accounts of what it is to be human. To explore the human, she demonstrates, is to acknowledge the relationship between culture and what we don't know: not the familiar world picture presented to us by culture as 'reality', but the unsayable, or the strange region that lies beyond culture, which Lacan has called 'the real'. Culture, she argues, registers a sense of its own limits in ways more subtle than the theorists allow. This volume builds on the insights of Belsey's influential Critical Practice to provide not only an accessible introduction to contemporary theories of what it is to be human, but a major new contribution to current debates about culture. Taking examples from film and art, fiction and poetry, Culture and the Real is essential reading for those studying or working in cultural criticism, within the fields of English, Cultural Studies, Film Studies and Art History.

Table of Contents

1 What's Real? Butler, Fish, Lyotard 2 Psychoanalysis Beyond Idealism: Hegel, Lacan, Freud 3 The Lacanian Real 4 Z?iz?ek Against Lacan 5 Culture's Magic Circle 6 Making Space: Perspective Vision and the Real 7 Desire and the Missing Viewer 8 The Real and the Sublime: Kant, Lyotard, Lacan 9 Sublime or Sublimation? Towards a Theory of Culture

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Details

  • NCID
    BA70142353
  • ISBN
    • 0415252881
    • 041525289X
  • LCCN
    2004009650
  • Country Code
    uk
  • Title Language Code
    eng
  • Text Language Code
    eng
  • Place of Publication
    London
  • Pages/Volumes
    xv, 172 p.
  • Size
    21 cm
  • Classification
  • Subject Headings
  • Parent Bibliography ID
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