A Very Short Introduction - Barthes

When Roland Barthes died in 1980, he was a formidable figure on the cultural and critical scene: a powerful presence, a commentator on everything under the sun, and a distinguished eminence of an avantgarde that had radically transformed the humanities in general and literary studies in particular. Twenty years later, his status has become more enigmatic. What is Roland Barthes for us today? What sort of author or intellectual force? Perhaps the question should be, rather, what Barthes should we read and why? Barthes’s longtime publisher, Seuil, has issued his complete works in a hefty three-volume edition of several thousand pages, which makes his hundreds of short, occasional pieces as available as his most famous books. His last book, La Chambre claire, a provocative, idiosyncratic, personal essay on photography, is much cited, praised, and debated. His early Mythologies is a formative work in cultural studies and a reference point in debates about the nature of this field. Many of the books and essays in between – particularly S/Z and Le Plaisir du texte – are read in college and university courses on literary criticism or literary theory. Is Barthes a literary theorist? As a homosexual who never openly declared himself and who left only a couple of brief posthumous texts about his sexual life, Barthes has also provoked interest in the field of gay and lesbian studies. And his autobiographical Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes remains an extraordinarily seductive and stimulating book, one of the most engaging we have about the adventures of thought and writing. If only because of the question of what to read, the need for an assessment of Barthes and his contribution is greater than ever. This book was originally written for the Modern Masters series published by Fontana and appeared shortly after Barthes’s death. It analyses Barthes’s achievements and makes available various Barthes for those who can find him useful, appealing, stimulating. The range of his work – of his moods and modes – is so broad that there is something for everyone here, but the key question is where can Barthes lead us, what does his appeal generate? For this new edition I have made only minor changes to the main text, both because I still stand by most of what I say here about Barthes and because too many interventions would risk creating an uneven text, where voices of youth and middle age struggled with each other. In addition to minor clarifications, I have inserted new bibliographical information, but above all I have added a final chapter on the fortunes of Barthes since his death and an argument about his particular value today. Contents Preface to this edition viii List of illustrations x 1 Man of parts 1 2 Literary historian 15 3 Mythologist 23 4 Critic 31 5 Polemicist 49 6 Semiologist 57 7 Structuralist 65 8 Hedonist 76 9 Writer 87 10 Man of letters 98 11 Barthes after Barthes 110 Notes and references 131 Further reading 136 Index 141