Product Description: What is astrology? Fiction for the bourgeoisie. The Tour de France? An epic. The brain of Einstein? Knowledge reduced to a formula. Like iconic images of movie stars or the rhetoric of politicians, they are fabricated. Once isolated from the events that gave birth to them, these “mythologies” appear for what they are: the ideology of mass culture...read more

Product Description: “In the sentence ‘She’s no longer suffering,’ to what, to whom does ‘she’ refer? What does that present tense mean?” —Roland Barthes, from his diaryThe day after his mother’s death in October 1977, Roland Barthes began a diary of mourning...read more

Product Description: “No denunciation without its proper instrument of close analysis,” Roland Barthes wrote in his preface to Mythologies. There is no more proper instrument of analysis of our contemporary myths than this book—one of the most significant works in French theory, and one that has transformed the way readers and philosophers view the world around them...read more

What is astrology? Fiction for the bourgeoisie. The Tour de France? An epic. The brain of Einstein? Knowledge reduced to a formula. Like iconic images of movie stars or the rhetoric of politicians, they are fabricated. Once isolated from the events that gave birth to them, these “mythologies” appear for what they are: the ideology of mass culture. When Roland Barthes's groundbreaking Mythologies first appeared in English in 1972, it was immediately recognized as one of the most significant works in French theory-yet nearly half of the essays from the original work were missing. This new edition of Mythologies is the first complete, authoritative English version of the French classic. It includes the brilliant “Astrology,” never published in English before.Mythologies is a lesson in clairvoyance. In a new century where the virtual dominates social interactions and advertisement defines popular culture, it is more relevant than ever.

Product Description: In 1974 Roland Barthes travelled in China as part of a small delegation of distinguished French philosophers and literary figures. They arrived in China just as the last stage of the Cultural Revolution was getting underway - the campaign to criticize Lin Biao and Confucius...read more

Product Description: Completed just weeks before his death, the lectures in this volume mark a critical juncture in the career of Roland Barthes, in which he declared the intention, deeply felt, to write a novel. Unfolding over the course of two years, Barthes engaged in a unique pedagogical experiment: he combined teaching and writing to "simulate" the trial of novel-writing, exploring every step of the creative process along the way...read more

The late French literary and social critic's intimate journal, first published after his death and translated into English here for the first time, and three other autobiographical texts in which he explores his homosexuality are combined in one volume. Original. (view table of contents)

Product Description: French philosopher and literary theorist Roland Barthes was one of the leading influences on the post-structuralist movement in twentieth-century literary thought, and some of his best-known works, like S/Z, speak directly to the essential and individual relationship between a reader and a literary text...read more

In Sade/Fourier/Loyola, eminent literary theorist Roland Barthes offers a fascinating treatise on the nature of philosophical creation. Barthes examines the parallel impulses of Loyola, the Jesuit saint, Sade, the renowned and sometimes pornographic libertine philosopher, and Fourier, the utopian theorist. All three, he makes clear, have been founders of languages--Loyola, the language of divine address; Sade, the language of erotic freedom; and Fourier, the language of social perfection and happiness. Each language is an all-enveloping system, a "secondary language" that isolates the adherent from the conventional world. The object of this book, Barthes makes clear, is not to decipher the content of these respective works, but to consider Sade, Fourier, and Loyola as creators of text. "Here they are all three brought together, the evil writer, the great utopian, and the Jesuit saint. There is not intentional provocation in this assembling (were there provocation, it would rather consist in treating Sade, Fourier, and Loyola as though they had not had faith: in God, the Future, Nature), no transcendence (the sadist, the contestator, and the mystic are not redeemed by sadism, revolution, religion), and, I add of these studies, although first published (in part) seperately, was from the first conceived to join the others in one book: the book of Logothetes, founders of language."--from the Preface

Product Description: Cy Twombly's gestures are some of the most beloved in 20th century art. The painter, graphic artist, sculptor and photographer is prized above all for the sweeping, scribbled marks that he makes with his drawing instruments. Though mostly indecipherable, at least on a literal level, Twombly's colorful, dense gestures are compellingly articulate in their rhythm, line, allusion and mood...read more

Product Description: Cy Twombly is undoubtedly the most sensitive mind among the greats of contemporary art. His work finds its most personal expression in the small, intimately sized drawings which he has from the very outset produced by way of accompaniment to his paintings: they not only reflect all the stages in the development of his painterly oeuvre but essentially also transcend it...read more

Product Description: A little-known gem, the text of Barthes’s What Is Sport? was never reprinted in the Seuil editions of his Complete Works—neither the three-volume version nor the later five-volume edition. It is published here in a graceful and faithful English translation by Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Howard...read more

Product Description: "I define the Neutral as that which outplays the paradigm, or rather I call Neutral everything that baffles paradigm." With these words, Roland Barthes describes a concept that profoundly shaped his work and was the subject of a landmark series of lectures delivered in 1978 at the Collège de France, just two years before his death...read more

Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was a major French writer, literary theorist and critic of French culture and society. His classic works include Mythologies and Camera Lucida. This work in the Barthes canon offers a discussion of the language of literary criticism.

Product Description: The Rustle of Language is a collection of forty-five essays, written between 1967 and 1980, on language, literature, and teaching--the pleasure of the text--in an authoritative translation by Richard Howard.

Product Description: "I define the Neutral as that which outplays the paradigm, or rather I call Neutral everything that baffles paradigm." With these words, Roland Barthes describes a concept that profoundly shaped his work and was the subject of a landmark series of lectures delivered in 1978 at the Collège de France, just two years before his death...read more

Amazon.com Review: When the Hermitage in St. Petersburg celebrated the city's 300th anniversary in 2003, they assembled a selection of 50 years of Cy Twombly's works on paper, coinciding with the artist’s seventy-fifth birthday. At first look, even the most savvy and well-heeled art lover is apt to think "my kid could do that," and there is a (very surface) bit of truth to this...read more

This is a brilliant discussion of the language of literary criticism and a key work in the Barthes canon. It is a cultural and intellectual challenge to those who believe in the clarity, flexibility and neutrality of language, couched in Barthes' own inimitable and provocative style.