Roland Barthes

Annette Lavers

Richard Howard

Excellent conditon, some minor shelf wear to edges.

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Michigan

The Complete Edition, in a New Translation

"No denunciation without its proper instrument of close analysis," Roland Barthes wrote in his preface toMythologies. 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.

Our age is a triumph of codification. We own devices that bring the world to the command of our fingertips. We have access to boundless information and prodigious quantities of stuff. We decide to like or not, to believe or not, to buy or not. We pick and choose. We think we are free. Yet all around us, in pop culture, politics, mainstream media, and advertising, there are codes and symbols that govern our choices. They are the fabrications of consumer society. They express myths of success,well-being, or happiness. As Barthes sees it, these myths must be carefully deciphered, and debunked.

What Barthes discerned in mass media, the fashion of plastic, and the politics of postcolonial France applies with equal force to today's social networks, the iPhone, and the images of 9/11. This new edition ofMythologies, complete and beautifully rendered by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, critic, and translator Richard Howard, is a consecration of Barthes's classic--a lesson in clairvoyance that is more relevant now than ever.

Mythologies

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"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 diary

The day after his mother's death in October 1977, Roland Barthes began a diary of mourning. For nearly two years, the legendary French theorist wrote about a solitude new to him; about the ebb and flow of sadness; about the slow pace of mourning, and life reclaimed through writing. Named a Top 10 Book of 2010 by The New York Times and one of the Best Books of 2010 by Slate and The Times Literary Supplement, Mourning Diary is a major discovery in Roland Barthes's work: a skeleton key to the themes he tackled throughout his life, as well as a unique study of grief--intimate, deeply moving, and universal.

Mourning Diary

Richard Miller

An Essay

Preface by Richard Howard. Translated by Richard Miller. This is Barthes's scrupulous literary analysis of Balzac's short story "Sarrasine."

"When Roland Barthes wrote Camera Lucida in 1979, he had long been hailed as "the subtlest, most original, most sympathetic literary intelligence of the age" (John Sturrock, The New York Times Book Review)—yet this elegant, contemplative, and beautifully subjective volume revealed a new depth of pathos in his work. Commenting on artists such as Avedon, Clifford, Mapplethorpe, and Nadar, Barthes presents photography as an art outside the codes of language or culture, an art uniquely in touch with the experience of loss. This groundbreaking approach established Camera Lucida as one of the most important books on the subject, along with Susan Sontag's On Photography."

Condition: hardly noticeable, light wear along the edges and spine, but no real damage other than a very small dent in front cover ( slightly noticeable on thumbnail).
Otherwise, book appears untouched.
No rips, tears, missing pages, writing, stickers, etc.

Pennsylvania

Reflections on Photography

Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes's personal, wide-ranging, and contemplative volume--and the last book he published--finds the author applying his influential perceptiveness and associative insight to the subject of photography. Commenting on artists such as Avedon, Clifford, Mapplethorpe, and Nadar, Barthes presents photography as being outside the codes of language or culture, acting on the body as much as on the mind, and rendering death and loss more acutely than any other medium. This groundbreaking approach established Camera Lucida as one of the most important books of theory on the subject, along with Susan Sontag's On Photography.

Camera Lucida

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Examining the themes of presence and absence, the relationship between photography and theatre, history and death, these 'reflections on photography' begin as an investigation into the nature of photographs. Then, as Barthes contemplates a photograph of his mother as a child, the book becomes an exposition of his own mind.

Stephen Heath

These essays, as selected and translated by Stephen Heath, are among the finest writings Barthes ever published on film and photography, and on the phenomena of sound and image. The classic pieces "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative" and "The Death of the Author" are also included.

Image-Music-Text

Adam Phillips

New York

First published in 1977, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes is the great literary theorist's most original work—a brilliant and playful text, gracefully combining the personal and the theoretical to reveal Roland Barthes's tastes, his childhood, his education, his passions and regrets.

Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes

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This anthology by Roland Barthes is a reflection on his travels to Japan in the 1960s. In twenty-six short chapters he writes about his encounters with symbols of Japanese culture as diverse as pachinko, train stations, chopsticks, food, physiognomy, poetry, and gift-wrapping. He muses elegantly on, and with affection for, a system "altogether detached from our own." For Barthes, the sign here does not signify, and so offers liberation from the West's endless creation of meaning. Tokyo, like all major cities, has a center--the Imperial Palace--but in this case it is empty, "both forbidden and indifferent ... inhabited by an emperor whom no one ever sees." This emptiness of the sign is pursued throughout the book, and offers a stimulating alternative line of thought about the ways in which cultures are structured.

Empire of Signs

Matthew Ward

The Fashion System

What is it that we do when we enjoy a text? What is the pleasure of reading? The French critic and theorist Roland Barthes's answers to these questions constitute "perhaps for the first time in the history of criticism . . . not only a poetics of reading . . . but a much more difficult achievement, an erotics of reading . . . . Like filings which gather to form a figure in a magnetic field, the parts and pieces here do come together, determined to affirm the pleasure we must take in our reading as against the indifference of (mere) knowledge." --Richard Howard

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Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes

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Empire of Signs

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The Fashion System

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The Pleasure of the Text

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The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies

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The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies

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