The Rustle of Language

Roland Barthes

University of California Press, Jan 18, 1989 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 373 pages

The Rustle of Language is a collection of forty-five essays, written between 1967 and 1980, on language, literature, and teaching—the pleasure of the text—in an authoritative translation by Richard Howard.

Contents

• From Science to Literature: 3
• An Intransitive Verb?: 11
• Reflections on a Manual: 22
• Writing Reading: 29
• Freedom to Write: 44
• From Work to Text: 56
• Mythology Today: 65
• The Rustle of Language: 76
• Rhetorical Analysis: 83
• Style and Its Image: 90
• Pax Culturalis: 100
• The War of Languages: 106
• The Discourse of History: 127
• The Reality Effect: 141
• Writing the Event: 149
• Revelation: 157
• Kristevas Semeiotike: 168
• To Learn and to Teach: 176
• Bloy: 191
• Michelets Modernity: 208
• F B: 223
• The Baroque Side: 233
• Reading BrillatSavarin: 250
• An Idea of Research: 271
• heure: 277
• Loves: 296
• Writers Intellectuals Teachers: 309
• To the Seminar: 332
• The Indictment Periodically Lodged: 343
• The Image: 350
• Deliberation: 359

About the author

Roland Barthes was born in 1915 and studied French literature and classics at the University of Paris. After teaching French at universities in Rumania and Egypt, he joined the Centre de Recherche Scientifique, where he devoted himself to research in sociology and lexicology. He was a professor at the Collège de France until his death in 1980. Richard Joseph Howard was born in Cleveland, Ohio on October 13, 1929. He received a B.A. from Columbia University in 1951 and a master's degree in 1952. He 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 taught in the Writing Division of the School of the Arts, Columbia University. He died on March 31, 2022, in Manhattan, at the age of 92.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Rustle of Language
• Author: Roland Barthes
• Translated by: Richard Howard
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: University of California Press, 1989
• ISBN: 0520066294, 9780520066298
• Length: 373 pages
• Subjects: Language Arts & Disciplines / General; Language Arts & Disciplines / Linguistics / General; Language Arts & Disciplines / Linguistics / Semantics; Literary Criticism / European / General; Literary Criticism / Semiotics & Theory; Philosophy / Language; Reference / Word Lists