Roland Barthes

Barthes, Roland - rôläNˈ bärt, 1915–80, French critic. Barthes was one of the founding figures in the theoretical movement centered around the journal Tel Quel. In his earlier works, such as Writing Degree Zero (tr. 1953) and Mythologies (1957, tr. 1972), he argued that literature, like all forms of communication, is essentially a system of signs. As such, he Read More...

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Roland Barthes

1 .

Barthes: A Very Short Introduction
by Jonathan Culler. 143 pgs.

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This acclaimed short study, originally published in 1983, and now thoroughly updated, elucidates the varied theoretical contributions of Roland Barthes (1915-80), the 'incomparable enlivener of the literary mind' whose lifelong fascination was with the way people make their world intelligible. He has a multi-faceted claim to fame: to some he is the structuralist who outlined a 'science of literature', and the most prominent promoter of semiology; to others he stands not for science but pleasure, espousing a theory of literature which gives the reader a creative role. This book describes the many projects, which Barthes explored and which helped to change the way we think about a range of cultural phenomena - from literature, fashion, wrestling, and advertising to notions of the self, of history, and of nature.

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Title Page

Contents

Preface to This Edition

List of Illustrations

Chapter 1: Man of Parts

Chapter 2: Literary Historian

Chapter 3: Mythologist

Chapter 4: Critic

Chapter 5: Polemicist

Chapter 6: Semiologist

Chapter 7: Structuralist

Chapter 8: Hedonist

Chapter 9: Writer

Chapter 10: Man of Letters

Chapter 11: Barthes after Barthes

Notes and References

Further Reading

Index

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2 .

Roland Barthes
by Graham Allen. 169 pgs.

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Roland Barthes is a central figure in the study of language, literature, culture and the media. This book prepares readers for their first encounter with his crucial writings on some of the most important theoretical debates, including: *existentialism and Marxism *semiology, or the 'language of signs' *structuralism and narrative analysis *post-structuralism, deconstruction and 'the death of the author' *theories of the text and intertextuality. Tracing his engagement with other key thinkers such as Sartre, Saussure, Derrida and Kristeva, this volume offers a clear picture of Barthes work in-context. The in-depth understanding of Barthes offered by this guide is essential to anyone reading contemporary critical theory.

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Title Page

Contents

Series Editor's Preface

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Why Barthes?

Key Ideas

1: Writing and Literature

2: Critical Distance

3: Semiology

4: Structuralism

5: The Death of the Author

6: Textuality

7: Neutral Writing

8: Music and Photography

9: Camera Lucida

After Barthes

Further Reading

Works Cited

Index
3 .

Roland Barthes on Photography: The Critical Tradition in Perspective
by Nancy M. Shawcross. 130 pgs.

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Nancy Shawcross places Barthes' thought on photography in the context of his developing ideas about semiology, tracking origins, rejections, and departures. She shows Barthes' affinities with and distinction from other theorists of photography such as Baudelaire and Benjamin and examines his thought in the context of postmodern discussions of photography that followed it. Barthes enjoyed a long and shifting relationship with photography, first using it as metaphor, then exploring its use in movies, film stills, political campaigns, and popular photographic essays, and finally confronting it anew upon the death of his mother. Though his last book, Camera Lucida, has enormously influenced the study of visual images in the arts and humanities, this is the first examination in English of Barthes' work on the visual arts. Shawcross brings together and analyzes for the first time - in any language - all of Barthes' writings, both direct and indirect, about visual media in their many forms.

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Title Page

Contents

Preface

Abbreviations

1. Beyond the Photograph as Sign

2. Mythologies of the Photograph

3 Correspondences: Baudelaire and Barthes

4. Contextualizing Camera Lucida: "The Third Form"

5. Time: The Photographic Punctum

Epilogue: The Photograph and the Postmodern

Bibliography

Index
4 .

Barthes and Utopia: Space, Travel, Writing
by Diana Knight. 294 pgs.

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Barthes and Utopia explores the central role of utopias throughout the work of Roland Barthes, from demystification to structuralism, from textuality and sexual hedonism to his final preoccupation with love and mourning. Drawing on an unusually wide range of texts, Knight goes to the heart of Barthes's imaginative processes, his affective world, and his idiosyncratic value system. But, because utopia is the meeting point of Barthes's lifelong concern with the relationship between history, language, and sexuality, her study also inserts Barthes's work into larger political and theoretical concerns, in particular into ongoing debates around Orientalism and homosexuality.

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Title Page

Acknowledgements

Contents

Note on Abbreviations, References, and Translations

Introduction

I: Making Space

2: Structuralism Utopian and Scientific

3: Charles Fourier: 'An Inventor Not a Writer'

4: Colonial Mythologies

5: An Unhappy Sexuality: Morocco

6: 'A Reader Not a Visitor': Barthes in 'Japan'

7: Turkey and China: 'But Where is the Orient?'

8: Tricks of the Text

9: Return Journey: The South-West

10: Maternal Space

Afterword

Bibliography

Index
5 .

Roland Barthes: Against Language, in ETC: A Review of General Semantics
by James Michels. 19 pgs.

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6 .

The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida
by Sean Burke. 262 pgs.

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Title Page

Contents

Preface to Second Edition

Prologue: The Deaths of Paul de Man

Introduction: A Prehistory of the Death of the Author

1: The Birth of the Reader

2: The Author and the Death of Man

3: Misread Intentions

Epilogue

Technology and the Politics of Reading

'Half Dust, Half Deity': The Middle Way of Situated Authorship

Notes

Bibliography

Index
7 .

The Subject of Semiotics ("Roland Barthes" begins on p. 25)
by Kaja Silverman. 308 pgs.

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Preface

Contents

I: From Sign to Subject, a Short History

2: Primary and Secondary Processes

3

4: The Subject

5: Suture

6: Re-Writing the Classic Text

Notes

Selected Bibliography in English

Index
8 .

The Ghosts of Modernity (Chap. 3 "Roland Barthes, Ghostwriter of Modernity")
by Jean-Michel Rebate. 260 pgs.

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Jean-Michel Rabate, the eminent French Joycean, combines psychoanalytical and philosophical concepts in rereading the history of modernity to give a more precise meaning to the term modernism. Rabate focuses throughout on a single theme, the ghostly nature of modernity. In writing a history of the concept of modernity with the awareness that the radically new has often been subject to the effects of the return of the repressed. Rabate analyzes the notion of loss in various fields: in Freudian aesthetics of color, in literary history, and in philosophy. The postmodernist fascination with a lost object allows a reconsideration of the boundaries of such terms as modernism and postmodernism. The conclusion ties together all these motifs, from Joyce to Barthes, and shows their theoretical basis in Marx's criticism of ideology and in Freud's consideration of mourning. From the analysis of "color" as an unthinkable object of discourse to an aesthetics of the unpresentable, Rabate points to the possibility of an "ethics of mourning", which would seem capable of overcoming the dead end of history whose ending condemns it to eternal repetition.

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Crosscurrents: Comparative Studies in European Literature and Philosophy Edited by S. E. Gontarski

Contents

Foreword

Preface

Introduction: The Penultimate . . . Is Dead

One: The Masters of Colors That Know

Two: André Breton's Ghostly Stance

Three: Roland Barthes, Ghostwriter of Modernity

Four: Mallarmé's Crypts

Five: Verlaine and Mallarmé Between the Angels and the Ghosts of Language

Six: Broch's Modernity as Crime, or the Sleepwalking of Theory

Seven: Beckett and the Ghosts of Departed Quantities

Eight: Shades of the Color Gray

Nine: Uncoupling Modernism

Conclusion

Notes

Index
9 .

Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader (Chap. 8 "Roland Barthes")
by David Lodge, Nigel Wood. 552 pgs.

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'in our era, criticism is not merely a library of secondary aids to the understanding and appreciation of literary texts, but also a rapidly expanding body of knowledge in its own right' David Lodge This new edition of David Lodge's Modern Criticism and Theoryis fully revised and expanded to take account of the developments in theoretical contemporary literary criticism since the publication of the first edition in 1988. Building on the strengths of the first edition, this volume is designed to introduce the reader to the guiding concepts of present literary and cultural debate by presenting substantial extracts from the most seminal thinkers. As with the original edition there is a selection of the most important and representative work from the major schools in contemporary criticism. Concise introductions with updated suggestions for further reading give a context for each essay and the editors have provided footnotes that help explain the most difficult references. Both students and general readers are encouraged to identify for themselves links between essays, as the selection is ordered both historically and thematically.

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Title Page

Contents

Foreword

Preface to the Second Edition

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1: Ferdinand de Saussure

Notes

Chapter 2: Walter Benjamin

Introductory Note - Nw

Introductory Note-Dl

Chapter 3: Roman Jakobson

Notes

Notes

Chapter 4: Jacques Lacan

Introductory Note - Dl

Notes

Chapter 5: Jacques Derrida

Introductory Note - Dl

Notes

Chapter 6: Mikhail Bakhtin

Introductory Note - Dl

Notes

Introduction Note - Dl

Chapter 7: Tzvetan Todorov

Introductory Note -- Dl

Chapter 8: Roland Barthes

Note

Notes

Introductory Note -- Dl

Chapter 9: Michel Foucault

Chapter 10: Wolfgang Iser

Introductory Note - Dl

Notes

Introductory Note - Dl/Nw

Chapter 11: Julia Kristeva

Notes

Introductory Note - Dl/Nw

Chapter 12: Harold Bloom

Chapter 13: En D. Hirsch Jr.

Introductory Note-Dl/Nw

Notes

Introductory Note-Dl

Chapter 14: M. H. Abrams

Notes

Chapter 15: J. Hillis Miller

Introductory Note - Dl

Notes

Chapter 16: HéLène Cixous

Introductory Note - Dl

Introductory Note -- Dl/Nw

Chapter 17: Edward Said

Notes

Chapter 18: Stanley Fish

Introductory Note - Dl/Nw

Notes

Chapter 19: Elaine Showalter

Introductory Note

Notes [references to 'This Volume' Are to the New Feminist Criticism (1985), Ed. Showalter.]

Introductory Note-Dl

Chapter 20: Paul de Man

Notes

Chapter 21: Fredric Jameson

Introductory Note - Dl

Notes

Chapter 22: Terry Eagleton

Introduction Note - Dl/Nw

Notes

Introductory Note - Dl

Chapter 23: Geoffrey Hartman

Chapter 24: Juliet Mitchell

Introductory Note - Dl

Introductory Note - Dl

Chapter 25: Umberto Eco

Introductory Note - Nw

Chapter 26: Jean Baudrillard

Notes

Chapter 27: Luce Irigaray

Introductory Note - Nw

Chapter 28: Patrocinio P. Schweickart

Introduction Note - Nw

Notes

Chapter 29: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Introductory Note - Nw

Notes

Chapter 30: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Introductory Note - Nw

Notes

Chapter 31: Stephen Greenblatt

Introductory Note - Nw

Notes

Chapter 32: Jerome Mcgann

Introductory Note - Nw

Index
10 .

Ideology and Art: Theories of Mass Culture from Walter Benjamin to Umberto Eco (Chap. V "Roland Barthes: The Unculture of Ideology")
by Robin Ridless. 256 pgs.

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Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

Chapter I: Walter Benjamin: The Changing of the Superstructure

Chapter II: Bertolt Brecht: The Author as Producer

Chapter III: Autonomous Culture: Surviving Message of the Shipwrecked

Chapter IV: Umberto Eco and "Social Life as a Sign-System"

Chapter V: Roland Barthes: the Unculture of Ideology

Conclusion: Mechanical Reproduction in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Select Bibliography
11 .

Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism ("Theorizing White Consciousness for a Post-Empire World: Barthes, Fanon, and the Rhetoric of Love" begins on p. 86)
by Ruth Frankenberg. 361 pgs.

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Contents

Introduction: Local Whitenesses, Localizing Whiteness

Fictions of Whiteness: Speaking the Names of Whiteness in U.S. Literature

Rereading Gandhi

Theorizing White Consciousness for A Post-Empire World: Barthes, Fanon, and the Rhetoric of Love

On the Social Construction of Whiteness Within Selected Chicana/O Discourses

Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination

Locating White Detroit

Brown-Skinned White Girls: Class, Culture, and the Construction of White Identity in Suburban Communities

Laboring Under Whiteness

Island Racism: Gender, Place, and White Power

Minstrel Shows, Affirmative Action Talk, and Angry White Men: Marking Racial Otherness in the 1990s

Bibliography

Contributors

Index
12 .

Text: The Genealogy of an Antidisciplinary Object (Chap. 5 "The Text Tel Quel: Barthes's Pleasure")
by John Mowitt. 246 pgs.

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Contents

* Acknowledoments

* Introduction: the Two Texts

Part 1

1: * Textuality and the Critique of Disciplinary Reason

2: The Text Goes Pop

Part II

3: * the Text Tel Quel: Derrida's Play

4: The Text Tel Quel: Kristeva's Productivity

5: * the Text Tel Quel: Barthes's Pleasure

Part III

6: The Textual Analysis of Film

7: Toward the Textual Analysis of Music

8: * Conclusion: Textual Politics

* Notes

* Index
13 .

Twentieth-Century Rhetorics and Rhetoricians: Critical Studies and Sources ("Roland Gerard Barthes (1915-1980)" begins on p. 23)
by Michael G. Moran, Michelle Ballif. 426 pgs.

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Much work has been done on rhetoric and rhetorical theory in the 20th century, with scientists discussing the rhetoric of the scientific method and philosophers debating the rhetoric of the metaphysical tradition. This reference summarizes major trends in rhetoric during the last hundred years. Included are alphabetically arranged entries on 40 20th- century rhetoricians, such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Roland Barthes, Edward P. J. Corbett, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Walter J. Ong, and I. A. Richards. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and provides a brief biography, an analysis of the figure's rhetorical theory, and a bibliography of primary and secondary works. The volume concludes with extensive bibliographical material.

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Copyright Acknowledgments

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FRANK AYDELOTTE (1880-1956)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MIKHAIL BAKHTIN (1895-1975)

NOTES

ROLAND GÉRARD BARTHES (1915-1980)

JAMES A. BERLIN (1942-1994)

NOTES

ANN E. BERTHOFF (1924- )

BIBLIOGRAPHY

WAYNE C. BOOTH (1921- )

CONCLUSION

JAMES BRITTON: (1908-1994)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GERTRUDE BUCK: (1871-1922)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

KENNETH DUVA BURKE: (1897-1993)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FRANCIS CHRISTENSEN (1902-1970)

BIBLIOGRAHY

HÉLÈNE CIXOUS (1937- )

NOTES

ROBERT J. CONNORS (1951- )

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EDWARD P. J. CORBETT (1919-1998)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FRANK J. D'ANGELO (1928- )

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PAUL DE MAN (1919-1983)

NOTES

JACQUES DERRIDA (1930-)

NOTE

PETER ELBOW (1935- )

BIBLIOGRAPHY

JANET EMIG (1928- )

BIBLIOGRAPHY

LINDA FLOWER (1944- )

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MICHEL FOUCAULT (1926-1984)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ERNESTO GRASSI (1902-1992)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

JÜRGEN HABERMAS (1929- )

NOTES

WINIFRED HORNER (1922-)

BEBLIOGRAPHY

JAMES L. KINNEAVY (1920-1999)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ALBERT KITZHABER (1915- )

BIBLIOGRAPHY

RICHARD A. LANHAM (1936--)

NOTE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ANDREA A. LUNSFORD (1942- )

BIBLIOGRAPHY

JAMES MOFFETT (1929-1996)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DONALD M. MURRAY (1924- )

BIBLIOGRAPHY

RICHARD OHMANN (1931- )

BIBLIOGRAPHY

WALTER J. ONG (1912- )

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CHAÏM PERELMAN (1912-1984)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. A. RICHARDS (1893-1979)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

NOTES

MINA SHAUGHNESSY (1924-1978)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

STEPHEN E. TOULMIN (1922- )

BIBLIOGRAPHY

VICTOR J. VITANZA (1940- )

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Richard M. Weaver (1911-1963)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

W. ROSS WINTEROWD (1930- )

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ABOUT THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS
14 .

The French Critic, 1549-1967 (Chap. 9 "Structuralism: From Barthes to Levi-Strauss")
by Wallace Fowlie. 186 pgs.

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Crosscurrents/Modern Critiques

Crosscurrents/Modern Critiques

Preface

Contents

1: French Criticism from the Renaissance to the Nineteenth Century

2: Creative Criticism from Baudelaire to Gide

3: Professional Critics

4: Catholic Critics

5: Existentialism

6: At Midcentury Introduction to the New Criticism

7: Surrealist and Psychoanalytical Criticism

8: Primacy of the Text: Thematic Criticism

10: Conclusion: Crisis in Our Age of Criticism

Bibliography of Works Referred to or Quoted

Index
15 .

Rousseau's Legacy: Emergence and Eclipse of the Writer in France (Chap. 5 "The Cultural Twilight of Roland Barthes")
by Dennis Porter. 322 pgs.

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Rousseau's Legacy focuses on the new and influential paradigm of the writer that emerged in the decades immediately preceding the French Revolution. Ushered in by Rousseau's combining revolutionary sociopolitical critique with a new art of autobiography, the writer would henceforth differ greatly from the traditional "man of letters." Rousseau inaugurated the idea of a heroic and committed writerly life in which the opposition between public and private selves is collapsed. This was done in the cause of creating a future political community founded on transparency. Porter, with both a wide-ranging knowledge of contemporary theory and an informed interest in cultural/historical context, gives close readings of relevant works by a number of major French writers, including Stendhal, Baudelaire, Sartre, Barthes, Duras, Althusser, and Foucault. Thus, he explores the persistent importance of the Rousseauist paradigm for French literary culture. The book goes beyond a critique or theory that interprets literary or philosophical works for their own sake, to reveal representations and self-representations of the idea of the writer in paintings, engravings, and photographs, as well as in literary texts. In concluding, Porter argues that with the collapse of faith in social and individual regeneration through revolution, the archetype of such a writer is also waning.

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Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Putting the Polis in Command

Chapter 2 Stendhal: Overpoliticization and the Revenge of Literature

Chapter 3 Charles Baudelaire: Portrait of the Poet as Anti-Writer

Chapter 4 Jean-Paul Sartre: Writer, Militant, Graphomaniac

Chapter 5 the Cultural Twilight of Roland Barthes

Chapter 6 Marguerite Duras: Autobiographical Acts, Celebrity Status

Chapter 7 Epilogue: from Althusser's Theory of a Murder to Foucault's Aesthetics of Existence

Notes

Index

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