What kinds of pleasure do we take from writing and reading? What authority has the writer over a text? What are the limits of language's ability to communicate ideas and emotions? Moreover, what are the political limitations of these questions? The work of the French cultural critic and theorist Roland Barthes (1915-80) poses these questions, and has become influential in doing so, but the precise nature of that influence is often taken for granted. This is nowhere more true than in poetry, where Barthes' concerns about pleasure and origin are assumed to be relevant, but this has seldom been closely examined. This innovative study traces the engagement with Barthes by poets writing in English, beginning in the early 1970s with one of Barthes' earliest Anglophone poet readers, Scottish poet-theorist Veronica Forrest-Thomson (194775). It goes on to examine the American poets who published in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and other small but influential journals of the period, and other writers who engaged with Barthes later, considering his writings' relevance to love and grief and their treatment in poetry. Finally, it surveys those writers who rejected Barthes' theory, and explores why this was. The first study to bring Barthes and poetry into such close contact, this important book illuminates both subjects with a deep contemplation of Barthes' work and a range of experimental poetries.

The influence of Roland Barthes on contemporary culture has been the subject of much analysis, but never before has this influence been closely examined in relation to poetry. This innovative study traces Anglophone poetry’s response to the literary and cultural theory of Barthes — from debate to adoption, adaptation and rejection.

A full-length account of Barthes' lecture courses given in Paris,1977-80, placing his teaching within institutional, intellectual and personal contexts. Analysing texts and recordings of the four lectures together with his 1970s output, it brings together all the strands of Barthes' activity as writer, teacher and public intellectual.

This acclaimed short study, originally published in 1983, and now thoroughly updated, elucidates the varied theoretical contributions of Roland Barthes (1915-80), the 'incomparable enlivener of the literary mind' whose lifelong fascination was with the way people make their world intelligible. He has a multi-faceted claim to fame: to some he is the structuralist who outlined a 'science of literature', and the most prominent promoter of semiology; to others he stands not for science but pleasure, espousing a theory of literature which gives the reader a creative role. This book describes the many projects, which Barthes explored and which helped to change the way we think about a range of cultural phenomena - from literature, fashion, wrestling, and advertising to notions of the self, of history, and of nature. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

This comprehensive introductory study considers the full range of Barthes' work - from his early structuralist phase, through his post-structuralist explorations of "Text", to his late writings. In looking at the late work, often of an autobiographical or personal-lyrical nature, Rylance examines the relationship between the critical and the personal, as well as Barthes' relation to developments in feminism and postmodernism. Throughout, Barthes' writings are presented as paradigmatic of many of the major shifts in intellectual opinion in the post-war period. The book is part of a series reflecting the broad spectrum of modern European and American theory. It focuses on those cultural theorists who have had the most significant impact in the 20th century. The series aims to show how modern thinkers differ in their aproaches to interpreting culture, texts, society, language, history, gender and social life. Designed to be accessible to students, each volume in the series the thought and work of often difficult theorists in a clear and informative way, balancing exposition and critique.

This book provides a lively introduction to the work of Roland Barthes, one of the twentieth century's most important literary and cultural theorists. The book covers all aspects of Barthes's writings including his work on literary theory, mass communications, the theatre and politics. Moriarty argues that Barthes's writing must not be seen as an unchanging body of thought, and that we should study his ideas in the contexts within which they were formulated, debated and developed.

In this book, first published in 1989, Mary Bittner Wiseman interprets Roland Barthes’s experiments as efforts to reposition the human subject with respect to language and to time in order to let the subject escape from the language of a particular culture and the present time. With her insistent pushing against the boundaries of our standard academic assumptions, Mary Bittner Wiseman succeeds in interpreting Barthes’s effort to join the traditional and the new. This title will be of interest to students of literature and philosophy.

Understanding Barthes, Understanding Modernism is a general assessment of the modern literary and philosophical contributions of Roland Barthes. The first part of the volume focuses on work published prior to Barthes's death in 1980 covering the major periods of his development from Writing Degree Zero (1953) to Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1980). The second part focuses both on the posthumously published material and the legacies of his work after his death in 1980. This later work has attracted attention, for example, in conjunction with notions of the neutral, gay writing, and critiques of everyday life. The third part is devoted to some of the critical vocabulary of Barthes in both the work he published during his lifetime, and that which was published posthumously.

Revolution must of necessity borrow, from what it wants to destroy, the very image of what it wants to possess.—Roland Barthes In the field of contemporary literary studies, Roland Barthes remains an inestimably influential figure—perhaps more influential in America than in his native France. The Three Paradoxes of Roland Barthes proposes a new method of viewing Barthes’s critical enterprise. Patrizia Lombardo, who studied with Barthes, rejects an absolutist or developmental assessment of his career. Insisting that his world can best be understood in terms of the paradoxes he perceived in the very activity of writing, Lombardo similarly sees in Barthes the crucial ambiguity that determines the modern writer—an irresistible attraction for something new, different, breaking with the past, yet also an unavoidable scorn for the contemporary world. Lombardo demonstrates that her mentor’s critical endeavor was not a linear progression of thought but was, as Barthes described his work, a romance, a “dance with a pen.”