ABSTRACT
For a few weeks in 1980, post-structuralism was front-page news in Britain. When Colin MacCabe, a young assistant lecturer in the Faculty of English at Cambridge, was not confirmed as a full lecturer, the so-called serious newspapers picked up his dismissal and tried to explain what caused it. Re-reading English, a book of essays edited by Peter Widdowson, was published in 1982 with an Introduction subtitled “The crisis in English studies”. Catherine Belsey’s Critical practice avows itself as a rehearsal of theory and so is able to go there first and suit examples to that admitted priority. It draws many of its examples from drama and has been a far more significant intervention and has been taken by those who attack post-structuralism in literary theory as its exemplary text. Critical practice analyses the realist text as constructed to present itself to the reader as natural and spontaneous expression.
