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13 books match the query 'Barthes, Roland'
Black and Blue
The Bruising Passion of Camera Lucida, La Jete, Sans soleil, and Hiroshima mon amourCarol Mavor
Duke University Press, 2012
Personal recollections punctuate Mavor's dazzling interpretations of these and many other works of art and criticism. Childhood memories become Proust's "small-scale contrivances," tiny sensations that open onto panoramas. Mavor's mother lost her memory to Alzheimer's, and Black and Blue is framed by the author's memories of her mother and effort to understand what it means to not be recognized by one to whom you were once so known.
Critical Essays
Roland Barthes
Northwestern University Press, 1972
How to Read Barthes' Image-Music-Text
Ed White
Pluto Press, 2012
Roland Barthes remains one of the most influential cultural theorists of the postwar period and Image-Music-Text collects his most influential essays. Ed White provides students with a clear guide to this essential but difficult text.
As students are increasingly expected to write across a range of media, Barthes' work can be understood as an early mapping of what we now call interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary study. The book's detailed section-by-section readings makes Barthes' most important writings accessible to undergraduate readers.
This book is a perfect companion for teaching and learning Barthes' ideas in cultural studies and literary theory.
New Critical Essays
Roland Barthes
Northwestern University Press, 2009
Opacity and the Closet
Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and WarholNicholas de Villiers
University of Minnesota Press, 2012
Opacity and the Closet interrogates the viability of the metaphor of “the closet” when applied to three important queer figures in postwar American and French culture: the philosopher Michel Foucault, the literary critic Roland Barthes, and the pop artist Andy Warhol. Nicholas de Villiers proposes a new approach to these cultural icons that accounts for the queerness of their works and public personas.
Rather than reading their self-presentations as “closeted,” de Villiers suggests that they invent and deploy productive strategies of “opacity” that resist the closet and the confessional discourse associated with it. Deconstructing binaries linked with the closet that have continued to influence both gay and straight receptions of these intellectual and pop celebrities, de Villiers illuminates the philosophical implications of this displacement for queer theory and introduces new ways to think about the space they make for queerness.
Using the works of Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol to engage each other while exploring their shared historical context, de Villiers also shows their queer appropriations of the interview, the autobiography, the diary, and the documentary—forms typically linked to truth telling and authenticity.
Problems in General Linguistics
An Expanded Edition, Volume 1Émile Benveniste
HAU, 2026
This new edition will delight linguists and philosophers already familiar with Benveniste and introduce his work to a new generation of students. Benveniste studies are going through an enthusiastic revival in Europe; after reading this book, readers elsewhere will understand why.
Signs In Culture
Roland Barthes TodaySteven Ungar
University of Iowa Press, 1989
Roland Barthes's critical writings promoted postwar movements ranging from the New Novel to the Parisian version of structural analysis. As a theorist, he was inspired in large part by semiology, the general science of signs set forth in the work of Ferdinand de Saussure. This volume presents a challenging variety of essays that elaborate and comment on specific elements in the evolution of Barthes's study of signs, from the revolutionary semiology of his 1957 Mythologies to the semioclasm and semiotrophy of such post-1960s' books as S/Z, The Pleasure of the Text, and A Lover's Discourse.
The nine essays of Signs in Culture have been organized to express the striking interplay of language and writing as the ethics of form Barthes first described in his 1953 Writing Degree Zero. Each essay serves as a pivotal critical exercise beginning with or departing from Barthes's writing. Each essayist thus engages an expanded semiology which inscribes the life of signs within the institutions and practices that literary critics, philosophers, and historians alike have seen as constituting the elements of a cultural study and critique.
Signs and Images
Writings on Art, Cinema and PhotographyRoland Barthes
Seagull Books, 2016
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 four, Signs and Images, gathers pieces related to his central concerns—semiotics, visual culture, art, cinema, and photography—and features essays on Marthe Arnould, Lucien Clergue, Daniel Boudinet, Richard Avedon, Bernard Faucon, and many more.
Steel Chair to the Head
The Pleasure and Pain of Professional WrestlingNicholas Sammond, ed.
Duke University Press, 2005
The essayists include scholars in anthropology, psychology, film studies, communication studies, and sociology, one of whom used to wrestle professionally. Classic studies of wrestling by Roland Barthes, Carlos Monsiváis, Sharon Mazer, and Henry Jenkins appear alongside original essays. Whether exploring how pro wrestling inflects race, masculinity, and ideas of reality and authenticity; how female fans express their enthusiasm for male wrestlers; or how lucha libre provides insights into Mexican social and political life, Steel Chair to the Head gives due respect to pro wrestling by treating it with the same thorough attention usually reserved for more conventional forms of cultural expression.
Contributors. Roland Barthes, Douglas L. Battema, Susan Clerc, Laurence de Garis, Henry Jenkins III, Henry Jenkins IV, Heather Levi, Sharon Mazer, Carlos Monsiváis, Lucia Rahilly, Catherine Salmon, Nicholas Sammond, Phillip Serrat, Philip Sewell
The Barthes Effect
The Essay as Reflective TextRéda BensmaïaTranslated by Pat FedkiewForeword by Michèle H. Richman
University of Minnesota Press, 1987
The Barthes Effect was first published in 1987. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
The author acknowledges the essay as an eccentric phenomenon in literary history, one that has long resisted entry into the taxonomy of genres, as it concentrates on four works by Roland Barthes: The Pleasure of the Text, A Lover's Discourse, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, and Camera Lucida. Maintains that with Barthes the essay achieves a status of its own, as reflective text.
". . . a study rigorously conscious of the critical maneuvers it executes and, more importantly, questions as critical practice . . . " Bensmaïa's strategy produces a successful investigation of the interstices and slippages of meaning which Barthes addressed in his work." SubStance
Reda Bensmaia is associate professor in the departments of French and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota, and translator Pat Fedkiew, a graduate student in French at Minnesota. Michele Richman is associate professor of French at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Reading Georges Bataille: Beyond the Gift.
The Barthes Fantastic
Literature, Criticism, and the Practice of LanguageJohn Lurz
University of Chicago Press, 2025
In The Barthes Fantastic, John Lurz explores the intersection of literature and everyday life—and confronts some habits of literary study—through a reading of the work of Roland Barthes. An influential French theorist, Barthes wrote prolifically on the place of language and the play of signs in the ways we produce cultural and aesthetic meaning. Ranging across the entire sweep of Barthes’s varied career, Lurz shows how Barthes’s insights into signification and literature involve particular intellectual activities that impart significance to the world. Doing so allows him to develop an expanded understanding of the fantastic as a conceptual category—a way of thinking—in which the texts we read come to inform the texture of our real lives. Ultimately, The Barthes Fantastic enlarges our sense of what we learn as students of literature and gives us a new picture of a writer we thought we knew.
The Grain of the Voice
Interviews 1962-1980Roland Barthes
Northwestern University Press, 2009
This book brings together the great majority of Barthes’s interviews that originally appeared in French in Le Figaro Littéraire, Cahiers du Cinéma, France-Observateur, L'Express, and elsewhere. Barthes replied to questions—on the cinema, on his own works, on fashion, writing, and criticism—in his unique voice; here we have Barthes in conversation, speaking directly, with all his individuality. These interviews provide an insight into the rich, probing intelligence of one of the great and influential minds of our time.
Touching Photographs
Margaret Olin
University of Chicago Press, 2012
Photography does more than simply represent the world. It acts in the world, connecting people to form relationships and shaping relationships to create communities. In this beautiful book, Margaret Olin explores photography’s ability to “touch” us through a series of essays that shed new light on photography’s role in the world.