Belsey used many key terms in her passage above such as humanism, empiricism, reality and idealism are not clear enough. In philosophy, …show more content…
Even though, Belsey here does not say what kind of knowledge, but we may refer to it as life knowledge because other kind of knowledge such as science or maths need knowledge without experience. Knowledge derives from experience because without an eventful and marking past, we make wrong decisions without any wisdom of this mistake, For example, you are listening to a friend that is presently going through a hard situation and he is asking for your advice because you have been through the same situation before, thus making you a better person to ask because of your experience, This is what Belsey means by empiricism. We need the mind in order to translate knowledge into experience. For example, Locke saw the mind as a kind of ‘’empty’’ potentiality which is shaped by the impress of experience. What we may see here is that our experiences are part of our knowledge and concepts of life, the way we think and reasons we give for our doings are things that influence our development as human beings in this world. In short, knowledge and our concepts depends on our experience to help us understand the world better but we also use expressive realism to reflect on our …show more content…
This can be by our patterns, values, culture or language. For example, expressive realism uses language as a tool to represent the reality, author `s and reader`s experience of the world. Belsey followed post- Saussurean linguistics in her passage above to say that language itself is the key player in way the world works and the way we represent the world in literature. For instance, in Charles Dickens `s novel ‘’Great Expectations’’, we can see the difference between the low and middle class in language. The language reflects the reality of experience in the classes at that period and how low class speak to middle class, thus Dickens cannot make all the characters use the same language because he will lose the reality of his world. This is a great example to show that language is the creation of the reality in experience and the world. The strength of such approach is that expressive realism expresses the particular perceptions of language and truth, the individual insights of their