Critical Essays

Roland Barthes

Northwestern University Press, 1972 - Literary Collections - 279 pages

The essays in this volume were written during the years that its author's first four books were published in France. They chart the course of Barthe's criticism from the vocabularies of existentialism and Marxism (reflections on the social situation of literature and writer's responsibility before History) to a psychoanalysis of substances (after Bachelard) and a psychoanalytical anthropology (which evidently brought Barthes to his present terms of understanding with Levi-Strauss and Lacan).

Contents

• The World as Object: 3
• Baudelaires Theater: 25
• The Diseases of Costume: 41
• Putting on the Greeks: 59
• Will Burns Us: 77
• There Is No RobbeGrillet School: 91
• La Sorcière: 103
• Zazie and Literature: 117
• Workers and Pastors: 125
• Kafkas Answer: 133
• On Brechts Mother: 139
• Literature Today: 151
• Taking Sides: 163
• Literature and Discontinuity: 171
• Structure of the FaitDivers: 185
• The Last Word on RobbeGrillet?: 197
• The Imagination of the Sign: 205
• The Structuralist Activity: 213
• La Bruyère: 221
• The Metaphor of the Eye: 239
• The Two Criticisms: 249
• What Is Criticism?: 255
• Literature and Signification: 261

About the author

Roland Barthes (1915-1980), a French critic and intellectual, was a seminal figure in late twentieth-century literary criticism. Barthes's primary theory is that language is not simply words, but a series of indicators of a given society's assumptions. He derived his critical method from structuralism, which studies the rules behind language, and semiotics, which analyzes culture through signs and holds that meaning results from social conventions. Barthes believed that such techniques permit the reader to participate in the work of art under study, rather than merely react to it. Barthes's first books, Writing Degree Zero (1953), and Mythologies (1957), introduced his ideas to a European audience. During the 1960s his work began to appear in the United States in translation and became a strong influence on a generation of American literary critics and theorists. Other important works by Barthes are Elements of Semiology (1968), Critical Essays (1972), The Pleasure of the Text (1973), and The Empire of Signs (1982). The Barthes Reader (1983), edited by Susan Sontag, contains a wide selection of the critic's work in English translation. Richard Howard was born in Cleveland, Ohio on October 13, 1929. He received a B.A. from Columbia University in 1951 and studied at the Sorbonne as a Fellow of the French Government in 1952-1953. He briefly worked as a lexicographer, but soon turned his attention to poetry and poetic criticism. His works include Trappings: New Poems; Like Most Revelations: New Poems; Selected Poems; No Traveler; Findings; Alone with America; and Quantities. He won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1969 for Untitled Subjects. He is also a translator and published more than 150 translations from the French. He received the PEN Translation Prize in 1976 for his translation of E. M. Cioran's A Short History of Decay and the American Book Award for his 1983 translation of Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal. In 1982, he was named a Chevalier of L'Ordre National du Mérite by the government of France. He teaches in the Writing Division of the School of the Arts, Columbia University.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Critical Essays
• Author: Roland Barthes
• Translated by: Richard Howard
• Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 1972
• ISBN: 0810105896, 9780810105898
• Length: 279 pages
• Subjects: Literary Collections / Essays; Literary Criticism & Collections / Essays; Literary Criticism / General; Literary Criticism / Semiotics & Theory