Blimey, this lit crit, almost bit off more than she could chew with Catherine Belsey's super clever Criticism: Ideas in Profile, her 11th book and third re criticism per se. I think, she is saying, academics, philosophers, psychiatrists, literary critics et al, complicate things by looking for works to be "ennobling", for explanations (of work) via theories and biographies, or as Milan Kundera put it, "despair at this era befogged with ideas, and indifferent to works".
Belsey takes a bravura tour from Plato to Aristotle, on to Nietzsche (“works to alleviate despair”), and the moderns, Derrida and Barthes with signifiers and signified, via Freud deconstructing Mona Lisa’s smile as a symbol of Mother “forbidding homoerotic acts”. Ah here Siggy.
In a recent interview Belsey said: “We get more out of a work if we bracket judgment in order to reflect on what it [the work] is doing and how, what it says, who it is addressed to. Criticism as a set of value judgments gets in the way.”
Or, park your prejudices at the door, and, with pleasure, dive in. My kind of girl. I think.
