Description
Book SynopsisA major collection of essays and interviews from an iconic 20th-century philosopher in five volumes, now all available together in paperback. Roland Barthes was a restless, protean thinker. A constant innovator—often as a daring smuggler of ideas from one discipline to another—he first gained an audience with his pithy essays on mass culture and then went on to produce some of the most suggestive and stimulating cultural criticism of the late twentieth century, including
Empire of Signs,
The Pleasure of the Text, and
Camera Lucida. In 1976, this one-time structuralist outsider was elected to a chair at France’s preeminent Collège de France, where he chose to style himself as a professor of literary semiology until his death in 1980.
The greater part of Barthes’s published writings has been available to a French audience since 2002, but now, translator Chris Turner presents a collection of essays, interviews, prefaces, book reviews, and other journalistic material for the first time in English and divided into five themed volumes. Volume three,
Masculine, Feminine, Neuter, consists of his writing on literature, covering his peers and influences, writers in French and other languages, contemporary and historical writers, and world literature.
Trade Review"Given the diversity of these pieces in terms of history and content, it is crucial that the translator has made a good job of briefly contextualizing all the pieces and that the translations understand, especially in relation to the gendering that operates in the French language and to some of the more recondite references, that the renderings into English need, periodically, the helping-hand of an attuned and scholarly – that is experienced – editor and translator of Barthes."
* H-France Review *
Table of ContentsPre-Novels
Recovering the Unburies Treasure (On Popular Poetry)
The Man-Eater (On Zola’s Nana)
Maupassant and the Physics of Misfortune
The Cathedrals of Novels (On Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame of Paris)
Round Table Discussions
New Pathways of Literary Criticism in France
A Personal Statement on Robbe-Grillet
The Two Sociologies of the Novel
Alain Girard: ‘The Diary’
Parallel Lives
Pleasure in Language
Edoardo Sanguineti
Preface (to Ecyclopédie Bordas, Volume VIII)
Preface (to Jacques Prévert, Fatras)
Argument and Prospectus: A Letter to Philippe Roger
Preface (to Ecyclopédie Bordas, Volume IX)
Interview-Preface to Littérature occidentale
From Them to Us
‘It All Comes Together’
Masculine, Feminine, Neuter
