Barthes-Work To Text

Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, 2019

This essay explores Roland Barthes' recourse to phenomenology, especially in the later work where his phenomenology is found to be more indebted to Husserl than to Sartre. It also finds parallels between what Barthes claims is the eidos of photography and what he implies about the nature of literature. Louis-Jean Calvet describes an encounter between thirty two year old Roland Barthes and one of the editors of the newspaper Combat, Maurice Nadeau, which resulted in Barthes submitting two manuscripts for possible publication. Nadeau agreed to publish one of them, "Le Degré zéro de l'écriture," and added a foreword in which he wrote "Roland Barthes is a young, unknown writer.. .. Yet, after several conversations with him, we decided that this young man, the fanatic about language (who has thought of nothing else for two years), had something new to say" (qtd. in Calvet 78). Barthes would later pass through various schools of thought; and indeed toward the end of his career he himself would list some of the stages along the way-social mythology, semiology, textuality, and morality-and situate his books within them. Of course, it is possible to question these phases and find other labels. Why not simply distinguish between "early" and "late" Barthes? Why not label the more inward-looking last phase "autobiographical"? What about Barthes the structuralist or Barthes the poststructuralist?1 In a biography of Barthes which appeared in 2015-a year which marked a revival of interest in Barthes particularly in Europe and North America as reflected in numerous international conferences, seminars, exhibitions, scholarly books and articles-Andy Stafford suggests that although Barthes would not shy away from making use of the tools provided by particular theoretical movements, he would at the same time resist or even undermine each 1

Published in Mike Gane and Nicholas Gane (eds.): ROLAND BARTHES, vol. I-III, Sage Masters of Social Thought, 2004

For Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes literature appears to be inseparable from the language in which it speaks. With their theories of language as the starting point, I discuss how their views on literature meet. Their paths cross, for example, in the antithesis: the idea that the allegorical counter-image creates the field of tension in the text that is able to release one from all that which is cramped and unfree in existence. This release always comes 'from within,' from language's concrete use of emblematic or coded stereotypes. And not 'from without,' like the impact of an already existing truth or release in a symbolic indirectness in the text. In Benjamin's critique of the 'profane concept of symbols' of classical-romantic aesthetics and in his indication of the cognitive potential of the dialectic concept of allegory there is an attitude which is fundamentally in agreement with that of Barthes regarding the semiotic way in which both the content and the expression sides of language function.

The Routledge Companion to Canonical Authors in Social Theory on Consumption, 2017

French essayist, linguist, literary critic, and semiotician, Roland Barthes (1915-1980) is hard to pigeonhole. His boundless curiosity for disparate life and speculative domains translates into a heterogeneous corpus of works, which covers art, fashion, language and writing, literature, love, myths, music, philosophy, photography, semiotics, and sport. His critique to the traditional notion of authorship (1967 [2002]) – a position positing the need to connect a text to its writer in order to interpret it – makes using Barthes’ biography to approach his intellectual production particularly sensitive. Barthes is sharp on the point when he says that the writer is not a text’s ‘author’ but a text’s ‘scriptor’. In doing so, he ratifies the ‘death of the author’ and the beginning of the modern writer’s era. The scriptor “is born simultaneously with his text; he is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his writing, he is in no way the subject of which his book is the predicate (…).” (p. 221) The scriptor’s role is hence that of assembling pre-existing texts (i.e. citations) in a novel manner and of empowering the reader. Since there is no ‘Author-God’, a text has no theological meaning; “nothing has to be deciphered” (p. 223).

Criticism and Critical Theory, 1984

This essay attempts not so much to reconcile Marxism and Structuralism as to side-step some of their inbuilt antagonisms. To this end I have found it necessary ro resort to certain theoretical texts and propositions which both pre- and post-date the problem. Exemplary among these is the combined oeuvre of Voloshinov/Bakhtin, especially V.N. Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (London, Seminar Press, 1973) and Freudianisnz; A Marxist Critique (London, Academic Press, 1976) Under his own name, Bakhtin published two applications of his 'dialogic' theory of the literary utterance, Rabelais and His World, (Cambridge., Mass., MIT Press, 1968) and Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics, (Ann Arbor, Ardis, l973). Apart from Julia Kristeva's useful commentary on Bakhtin in the introduction to the French edition of Rabelais, the implications of the work seem to have been ignored by'mainstream structuralism. For a concise and useful account in English though, see Tony Bennett, Formalism and Marxism (London, Methuen , 1979). A similar project concerned with a theory of the utterance and the conditions of production of discourse is now being developed by French theorists in, for example, Michel Pêcheux , Les verités de la palice (Paris, Maspero, l975), Régine Robin, Histoire et linguistique (Paris, Colin , 1973) and Françoise Gadet and Michel Pêcheux , La langue introuvable (Paris, Maspero, 1981). Compatible with this project and similarly influenced by the work of Louis Althusser is the work by Renée Balibar and her associates on the question of the 'national language'. See Les francais fictifs: le rapport des styles littéraires au français national (Paris, Hachette ,1974) and R. Balibar and D. Laporte , Le français national: politique et pratique de la langue nationale sur la Révolution (Paris, Hachette, 1974). Two recent works have significantly influenced my own argumenrs about necessary realignments of literature and history. These are Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders (London, NLB/Verso, 1983) and Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London, NLB/Verso, 1983). Anderson's analysis of the national context of literarure's purview and Moretti's reintroduction of the techniques of 'Rhetoric' into literary analysis along with the associated conceptions of consent and pact enabled me to attempt to form a bridge with the work of Antonio Gramsci and the concept of hegemony.

Theorizing the Subject, 2020

Ever since the Greek philosophers and fabulists pondered the question "What is man?," inquiries into the concept of the subject have troubled humanists, eventuating in fierce debates and weighty tomes. In the wake of the Descartes's cogito and Enlightenment thought, proposals for an ontology of the idealist subject's rationality, autonomy, and individualism generated tenacious questions regarding the condition of pre-consciousness, the operation of feelings and intuitions, the subject-object relation, and the origin of moral and ethical principles. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Marx, and theorists he and Engels influenced, pursued the materialist bases of the subject, through analyses of economic determinism, self-alienation, and false consciousness. Through another lineage, Freud and theorists of psychic structures pursued explanations of the incoherence of a split subject, its multipartite psychodynamics, and its relationship to signifying systems. By the latter 20th century, theorizations of becoming a gendered woman by Beauvoir, of disciplining power and ideological interpellation by Foucault and Althusser, and of structuralist dynamics of the symbolic realm expounded by Lacan, energized a succession of poststructuralist, postmodern, feminist, queer, and new materialist theorists to advance one critique after another of the inherited concept of the liberal subject as individualist, disembodied (Western) Man. In doing so, they elaborated conditions through which subjects are gendered and racialized and offered explanatory frameworks for understanding subjectivity as an effect of positionality within larger formations of patriarchy, slavery, conquest, colonialism, and global neoliberalism. By the early decades of the 21st Formatted: Centered Deleted: Nineteenth Deleted: Twentieth Deleted: Twentieth Deleted: racialized, and Deleted: Twenty-first century, posthumanist theorists dislodged the subject as the center of agentic action and distributed its processual unfolding across trans-species companionship, trans-corporeality, algorithmic networks, and conjunctions of forcefields. Persistently, theorists of the subject referred to an entangled set of related but distinct terms, such as the human, person, self, ego, interiority, and personal identity. And across diverse humanities disciplines, they struggled to define and refine constitutive features of subject formation, most prominently relationality, agency, identity, and embodiment.

International journal for innovation education and research, 2022

This article aims to analyze the short story Venha ver o pôr do sol, by Lygia Fagundes Telles, in order to understand how the compositional aspects of narrative contribute to the meaning of the text. Based on researches of authors like Saraiva, Eagleton, Salvatore D'Onofrio, Lygia Leite and Dino Del Pino, this study proposes a relation between literature and representation, presents the concept of narrative and, from its compositional aspects, analyzes the story, making inferences about the context. Therefore, it can be seen that the proper analysis of the aspects from the text allows for relevant reflections about its content.