Roland Barthes, whose centenary falls in 2015, was a restless, protean thinker. A constant innovator, often as a daring smuggler of ideas from one discipline to another, he first gained an audience with his pithy, semiological essays on mass culture, then unsettled the literary critical establishment with heretical writings on the French classics, before going on to produce some of the most suggestive and stimulating cultural criticism of the late twentieth century ("Empire of Signs," "S/Z," "The Pleasure of the Text, Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes"). In 1976, the one-time structuralist outsider was elected to a chair at France s pre-eminent academic institution, the College de France, choosing to style himself its Professor of Literary Semiology, though this last somewhat hedonistic and more subjectivist phase of his intellectual adventure was cut short by his untimely death in 1980.
The greater part of Barthes s published writings have been available to a French audience since the publication in 2002 of the expanded version of his "Oeuvres completes "[Complete Works], edited by Eric Marty. The present collection of essays, interviews, prefaces, book reviews and other occasional journalistic pieces, all drawn from that comprehensive source, attempts to give English-speaking readers access to the most significant previously untranslated material from the various stages of Barthes s career. It is divided (not entirely scientifically) into five themed volumes entitled: Theory, Politics, Literary Criticism, Signs and Images (Art, Cinema, Photography), and Interviews.
Barthes was always concerned to frame his interventions in theoretical form. Even when turning away from the scientism of earlier years, his inclination was to "theorize" the challenge that emotions like pleasure and bliss represented for his former approach. From his early musings on grammar and his pioneering thoughts on the sociology of literature, through the high period of structuralism to the beginnings of a post-structuralist turn in his reflections on Derrida and the creative contribution of the "reader," the essays and interviews in this first volume, loosely grouped around the theme of theory, suggest a progression that is both straight line and spiral.
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