Barthes
A Biography
Published on 18. November 2016
Book
Hardback
584 pages
978-1-5095-0565-4 (ISBN)
Description
Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was a central figure in the thought of his time, but he was also something of an outsider. His father died in the First World War, he enjoyed his mother's unfailing love, he spent long years in the sanatorium, and he was aware of his homosexuality from an early age: all this soon gave him a sense of his own difference. He experienced the great events of contemporary history from a distance. However, his life was caught up in the violent, intense sweep of the twentieth century, a century that he helped to make intelligible.
This major new biography of Barthes, based on unpublished material never before explored (archives, journals and notebooks), sheds new light on his intellectual positions, his political commitments and his ideas, beliefs and desires. It details the many themes he discussed, the authors he defended, the myths he castigated, the polemics that made him famous and his acute ear for the languages of his day. It also underscores his remarkable ability to see which way the wind was blowing ? and he is still a compelling author to read in part because his path-breaking explorations uncovered themes that continue to preoccupy us today.
Barthes's life story gives substance and cohesion to his career, which was guided by desire, perspicacity and an extreme sensitivity to the material from which the world is shaped ? as well as a powerful refusal to accept any authoritarian discourse. By allowing thought to be based on imagination, he turned thinking into both an art and an adventure. This remarkable biography enables the reader to enter into Barthes's life and grasp the shape of his existence, and thus understand the kind of writer he became and how he turned literature into life itself.
Reviews / Votes
"Barthes, like no other modern writer, invented a critical form that was "live" in every sense, where the labor of writing criticism acquired animate breath and pulse as it entered Barthes' chronicle of aesthetic preparation for a Vita Nova, a new life, a novel, a reading of ideologies, images, voices, cultural myths and above all literary texts. Such a self-writing subject poses a daunting challenge to the biographer. But Tiphaine Samoyault has risen to it, with a magisterial life of Roland Barthes, enriched by new archival material and her own peerless talents as both writer and literary critic." - Emily Apter, New York University "Tiphaine Samoyault's outstanding biography of Roland Barthes allows us to meet him in person, as it were, as a lively, seductive French intellectual. At the same time, Samoyault offers us a splendid introduction to Barthes' ground-breaking writings in so many fields, from literary theory to meditations about the meaning of human existence." - Thomas Pavel, The University of Chicago 'While offering the most detailed and elegantly written interpretation to date of the life and works of its remarkable subject, this book is much more than a traditional intellectual biography. Typhaine Samoyault's masterful, multilayered and, at times, lyrical narrative captures Roland Barthes the person and writer, essayist and scholar, and depicts him in his time and with his contemporaries, family and friends, colleagues and lovers, to be sure. Her phenomenal study tracks the doing and undoing of a great writer and thinker, a witness of what is still, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, very much our own time and cultural, indeed, political predicament. In so doing, she offers a valuable testimony of a person facing opportunities and challenges whose enduring lesson and bitter sweetness we have all learned to appreciate and savour.' - Hent de Vries, The Humanities Center, Johns Hopkins UniversityMore details
Edition
1. Auflage
Language
English
Place of publication
Oxford
United Kingdom
Publishing group
John Wiley and Sons Ltd
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Dimensions
Height: 232 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 50 mm
Weight
1030 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-5095-0565-4 (9781509505654)
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Persons
Tiphaine Samoyault is Professor of Comparative Literature at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3.
Content
Acknowledgements viii Bibliographical note x
Foreword by Jonathan Culler xi
Prologue: The death of Roland Barthes 1
Introduction 13
The voice 13
'Life' 15
1 Setting off 24
A father dead at sea 27
The mother as replacement father 35
2 'Gochokissime' 48
From the seaside. . . 48
. . . to the heart of Paris 55
3 His whole life ahead of him 64
The years of apprenticeship 64
Elective affinities 75
4 Barthes and Gide 83
The beginning and the end 84
Music on the large scale and the small 87
Homosexuality 90
Journal 92
5 His whole life behind him 99
From Antiquity to Greece 99
From the Mediterranean to the Atlantic 106
From the Atlantic to behind the lines 110
6 New vistas 121
The body and its illness 121
'At the sanatorium, I was happy' 126
The first texts 133
7 Sorties 143
Far from the sanatorium 143
'Nadeau, to whom I owe that capital thing, a debut . . .' 147
Far from Paris (1). Bucharest 150
Far from Paris (2). Alexandria 159
Modes of writing: the Ministry and 'Degree Zero' 164
8 Barthes and Sartre 177
The argument about responsibilities 178
Childhood and history 184
An invitation to the imaginary 188
9 Scenes 193
Liquidations 194
Theatre 205
The year 1955 216
Theatricality 221
10 Structures 231
The sign 232
The Ecole 237
Structure 248
The house 257
11 Literature 268
Encounters 269
Literary criticism 274
Barthes explains himself 283
The year 1966 291
Thinking the image 300
12 Events 306
Absences 307
The book on May: 'Sade, Fourier, Loyola' 317
Changes 320
Cut-ups 331
13 Barthes and Sollers 343
Friendship 346
Everyone's off to China 354
14 The body 367
The eye and the hand 371
Taste 379
Hearing and vision 384
Loving loving 391
15 Legitimacy 401
The professor 401
The College de France 409
Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes 413
The colloque de Cerisy 425
16 Barthes and Foucault 430
Parallel lives 431
An accompaniment 435
Two styles 437
17 Heartbreak 445
1977 445
Love 447
Death 458
The Mourning Diary 460
18 'Vita Nova' 470
15 April 1978 470
New life? 479
Clarity 484
The end 489
Notes 499
Image credits 565
Index 567
Foreword by Jonathan Culler xi
Prologue: The death of Roland Barthes 1
Introduction 13
The voice 13
'Life' 15
1 Setting off 24
A father dead at sea 27
The mother as replacement father 35
2 'Gochokissime' 48
From the seaside. . . 48
. . . to the heart of Paris 55
3 His whole life ahead of him 64
The years of apprenticeship 64
Elective affinities 75
4 Barthes and Gide 83
The beginning and the end 84
Music on the large scale and the small 87
Homosexuality 90
Journal 92
5 His whole life behind him 99
From Antiquity to Greece 99
From the Mediterranean to the Atlantic 106
From the Atlantic to behind the lines 110
6 New vistas 121
The body and its illness 121
'At the sanatorium, I was happy' 126
The first texts 133
7 Sorties 143
Far from the sanatorium 143
'Nadeau, to whom I owe that capital thing, a debut . . .' 147
Far from Paris (1). Bucharest 150
Far from Paris (2). Alexandria 159
Modes of writing: the Ministry and 'Degree Zero' 164
8 Barthes and Sartre 177
The argument about responsibilities 178
Childhood and history 184
An invitation to the imaginary 188
9 Scenes 193
Liquidations 194
Theatre 205
The year 1955 216
Theatricality 221
10 Structures 231
The sign 232
The Ecole 237
Structure 248
The house 257
11 Literature 268
Encounters 269
Literary criticism 274
Barthes explains himself 283
The year 1966 291
Thinking the image 300
12 Events 306
Absences 307
The book on May: 'Sade, Fourier, Loyola' 317
Changes 320
Cut-ups 331
13 Barthes and Sollers 343
Friendship 346
Everyone's off to China 354
14 The body 367
The eye and the hand 371
Taste 379
Hearing and vision 384
Loving loving 391
15 Legitimacy 401
The professor 401
The College de France 409
Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes 413
The colloque de Cerisy 425
16 Barthes and Foucault 430
Parallel lives 431
An accompaniment 435
Two styles 437
17 Heartbreak 445
1977 445
Love 447
Death 458
The Mourning Diary 460
18 'Vita Nova' 470
15 April 1978 470
New life? 479
Clarity 484
The end 489
Notes 499
Image credits 565
Index 567