Roland Barthes, (4 Volume Set)

Thirty years ago the English-speaking world was discovering the work of some of the key poststructuralist theorists for the first time: Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology had just appeared in translation, as had Roland Barthes’ S/Z, Jacques Lacan’s Écrits, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, and Pierre Macherey’s A Theory of Literary Production. English editions of Julia Kristeva’s Desire in Language and Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition were just around the corner.

The subsequent ‘theory wars’ that raged on campuses in the 1980s are now generally seen as a thing of the past: poststructuralism is now, largely, a familiar and widely taught part of the academic landscape in the English-speaking world.

Of all the poststructuralists, Roland Barthes (1915–80) is probably the most widely read. Mythologies has sold hundreds of thousands of copies in paperback and has never been out of print since it first appeared in English in 1972. And ‘The Death of the Author’, his short essay dating from 1968, is probably the most widely anthologized theoretical text of all. Moreover, even though he died over a quarter of a century ago, Barthes remains especially ‘alive’ to English-speaking audiences in that his voluminous writings are still being translated into English.

Reflecting the vibrancy and dynamism of Barthes Studies, this four-volume collection, a new title in Routledge’s Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory series, brings together the best and most influential cutting-edge and canonical research on Roland Barthes. The gathered materials address the full range of Barthes’ extremely diverse output to provide the definitive evaluation of his work.

With a full index, together with a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, Roland Barthes is an essential work of reference. It is destined to be valued by scholars, students, and researchers as a vital research resource.

Volume I

Section 1 : Myth, Doxa, History
Chapter 1 : The Great Hoax, The Blanchot Reader
Chapter 2 : New Criticism or New Fraud?, trans : Frank Towne
Chapter 3 : Alice and The Looking Glass : Roland BarThes as The Reader in History
Chapter 4 : Something for Nothing : BarThes in The Text of Ideology
Chapter 5 : History and Form : The Three Paradoxes of Roland BarThes
Chapter 6 : Laundering The Text : BarThes’s Criti-Myth-Oetics
Chapter 7 : From Event to Memory Site : Thoughts on Rereading Mythologies : Nottingham French Studies
Chapter 8 : Structuralism Utopian and Scientific : BarThes and Utopia : Space, Travel, Writing
Chapter 9 : Modern Mass to Postmodern Popular in BarThes’s Mythologies : Raritan : A Quarterly Review
Chapter 10 : Demystification : A Dialogue between BarThes and Lefebvre : Yale French Studies
Chapter 11 : BarThes and Doxa : Poetics Today
Chapter 12 : Roland BarThes and The Myth of a National Theater : French Forum
Chapter 13 : Quia Ego Nominor Leo : BarThes, Stereotypes, and Aesop’s Animals : Mosaic

Volume II

Section 2 : Writing/Reading
Chapter 14 : How Does One Speak to Literature? : Desire in Language : A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, trans : Thomas Gora et al.
Chapter 15 : Reading S/Z, Signs of The Times : Introductory Readings in Textual Semiotics
Chapter 16 : Roland BarThes and The Limits of Structuralism : Yale French Studies
Chapter 17 : Racine, Quarrels and Criticism : Roland BarThes : A Conservative Estimate
Chapter 18 : The Critical Difference : Balzac’s "Sarrasine" and BarThes’s S/Z, Untying The Text : A Post-Structuralist Reader
Chapter 19 : The Network (Synchrony) : Roland BarThes : Structuralism and After
Chapter 20 : Writing Itself : On Roland BarThes : Where The Stress Falls : Essays
Chapter 21 : The Cracked Mirror : Roland BarThes’s Anti-Autobiography Roland BarThes par Roland BarThes : French Literature Series
Chapter 22 : The Ideology of The Text : The Ideologies of Theory : Essays 1971–1986
Chapter 23 : Information or Noise? Economy of Explanation in BarThes’s S/Z and Shannon’s Information Theory, One Culture : Essays in Science and Literature
Chapter 24 : The Salutary Discomfort of Writing : Roland BarThes, Literature, and Obscurity : New Orleans Review
Chapter 25 : Author! Author! Reconstructing Roland BarThes : The Hudson Review
Chapter 26 : The Scribbler : Roland BarThes : The Figures of Writing
Chapter 27 : BarThes on Racine : A Different Speech Act Theory : Seventeenth-Century French Studies
Chapter 28 : BarThes and Femininity : A SynaesThetic Writing : Nottingham French Studies
Chapter 29 : And a Truth for a Truth : BarThes on Bataille, On Bataille : Critical Essays
Chapter 30 : Writing and "Rêv-olution" : Roland BarThes : Phenomenon and Myth - An Intellectual Biography
Chapter 31 : Roland BarThes and The Syllogisms of Literary Criticism : Mosaic
Chapter 32 : BarThes on Proust : Yale Journal of Criticism : Interpretation in The Humanities
Chapter 33 : BarThes, Theorist : Yale Journal of Criticism : Interpretation in The Humanities
Chapter 34 : Roland BarThes’ Novel : trans : Rosalind Krauss
Chapter 35 : Notes (on The Index Card)
Chapter 36 : The "Inkredible" Roland BarThes : Paragraph
Chapter 37 : "Preparation du romanesque" in Roland BarThes’s Reading of Sarrasine : Paragraph

Volume III

Section 3 : Love, Desire, Pleasure, Sex
Chapter 38 : Difference : Roland BarThes’s Pleasure of The Text, Text of Pleasure : Boundary
Chapter 39 : BarThes on Love : SubStance
Chapter 40 : Beyond The Jouissance Principle : Representations
Chapter 41 : Deliberating BarThes : Social Text
Chapter 42 : Dreaming Dissymmetry : BarThes, Foucault, and Sexual Difference, Men in Feminism
Chapter 43 : Eating Out : With BarThes, Literary Gastronomy
Chapter 44 : BarThes’ Body : Paragraph
Chapter 45 : Roland BarThes : The Discourse of Desire and The Question of Gender
Chapter 46 : Texts of Pleasure, Texts of Bliss : The Ecstasies of Roland BarThes
Chapter 47 : Toward Bliss : BarThes, Lacan, and Robbe-Grillet : Modern Fiction Studies
Chapter 48 : "Loving Writing : Fragments d’un discours amoureux", Symposium
Chapter 49 : All Love Told : BarThes and The Novel, Erotikon : Essays on Eros, Ancient and Modern

Section 4 : Sound and Vision
Chapter 50 : Re-reading Camera Lucida : The End of Art Theory : Criticism and Postmodernity
Chapter 51 : Loving It : Music and Criticism in Roland BarThes, Musicology and Difference : Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship
Chapter 52 : BarThes Explores Photography "as a Wound" : Paragraph
Chapter 53 : BarThes and Bazin : The Ontology of The Image, Writing The Image after Roland BarThes
Chapter 54 : BarThes’s Discretion, Writing The Image after Roland BarThes
Chapter 55 : Mythologies of The Photograph : Roland BarThes on Photography : The Critical Tradition in Perspective
Chapter 56 : Roland BarThes The Pianist : The Mediation of His Music : Semiotica
Chapter 57 : Pictures of The Past : Benjamin and BarThes on Photography and History : European Journal of Cultural Studies
Chapter 58 : BarThes and The Lesson of Saenredam : Diacritics
Chapter 59 : The Tenor of "Sarrasine" : PMLA
Chapter 60 : Funny Face : Humanism in Post-War French Photography and Philosophy : French Cultural Studies
Chapter 61 : Listening to BarThes with Millet : A Loving Overture : Esprit Créateur
Chapter 62 : Atonality and Tonality : Musical Analogies in Roland BarThes’s Lectures at The Collège de France

Volume IV

Section 5 : Queer BarThes
Chapter 63 : Bringing Out Roland BarThes
Chapter 64 : Roland BarThes : Toward an "écriture gaie", Camp Grounds : Style and Homosexuality
Chapter 65 : S/Z, Realism, and Compulsory Heterosexuality, Spectacles of Realism : Body, Gender, Genre
Chapter 66 : The Secretive Body : Roland BarThes’s Gay Erotics : trans : Charles A : Porter and Noah Guynn, Yale French Studies
Chapter 67 : BarThes in Tangiers : Renegotiating Perversity : Nottingham French Studies
Chapter 68 : From "Incident" to "Text" : Homosexuality and Autobiography in BarThes’s Late Writing : French Forum
Chapter 69 : What BarThes Couldn’t Say : On The Curious Occultation of Homoeroticism in S/Z’
Chapter 70 : BarThes’s Campy Fag Love : Contemporary French and Francophone Studies

Section 6 : Imagining OThers
Chapter 71 : The Pure Land Beyond The Seas : BarThes, Birch and The Uses of Japan : Screen
Chapter 72 : Oh, a Friend! : The BarThes Effect : The Essay as Reflective Text, trans : Pat Fedkiew
Chapter 73 : Japanese Eyes : Bringing Out Roland BarThes
Chapter 74 : BarThes and Orientalism : New Literary History
Chapter 75 : Roland BarThes Abroad, Writing The Image after Roland BarThes
Chapter 76 : AnoTher BarThes : Figuring The East : Segalen, Malraux, Duras, and BarThes
Chapter 77 : "L’Orient m’est indifférent" : Roland BarThes’ Japan, Cross-Cultural Travel : Papers from The Royal Irish Academy Symposium on Literature and Travel

Section 7 : The Late Roland BarThes
Chapter 78 : Roland BarThes (12 November 1915–26 March 1980), Critical Essays on Roland BarThes
Chapter 79 : The Deaths of Roland BarThes, The Work of Mourning
Chapter 80 : Roland BarThes in Retrospect : French Studies
Chapter 81 : The Last BarThes : Critical Inquiry
Chapter 82 : We Always Fail : BarThes’ Last Writings : SubStance
Chapter 83 : BarThesian Free Play : Yale French Studies
Chapter 84 : The LATE(r) BarThes : Constituting Fragmenting Subjects : Boundary
Chapter 85 : BarThes, Orpheus … : Paragraph
Chapter 86 : Affirming The Imaginary : Roland BarThes
Chapter 87 : Raymond Bellour, ‘"… rait" : Sign of Utopia : trans : Jeffrey Boyd, Yale Journal of Criticism
Chapter 88 : BarThes’ Laziness, trans, Jennifer Curtis Gage, Yale Journal of Criticism
Chapter 89 : Preparing The Novel : Spiralling Back : Paragraph