‘Barthes (A Very Short Introduction)’ by Jonathan Culler is a guide book about Roland Barthes. Roland Barthes (1915 – 1980) was a french ‘écrivain’ (writer), literary critic, literary theorist, semiologist (semiotician) and structuralism thinker. He made vast influences to humanities, social science, sociology, literary study, literary critic, philosophy and social thought.
In this small book, Culler summarises Barthes’s thoughts and pick out their essences.
Culler divided Barthes and his works into many various periods and aspects such as a Literary Historian, Mythologist, Semiologist, Hedonist and Writer. He don’t describe Barthes’s career as 4 periods usually mentioned (literary critic – semiologist or social mythologist – text theorist – romanesque author). And he describes clearly in each chapters but not surely chronologically.
A feature of this book is philosophical analysis of Barthes’s ‘pleasure’, in the French tradition, from Descartes to structuralism. The Cartesian consciousness to mind and subject is contrary to Barthes’s pleasure and emphasises of social codes and cultural skills. But ‘The notion of the body permits Barthes to avoid the problem of the subject: appealing to “the given that separates my body from other bodies and appropriates suffering or pleasure to it“, he emphasizes that he is not talking about subjectivity.’ Then Culler explains that ‘replacement of “mind” by “body” accords with Barthes’s emphasis on the materiality of the signifier as a source of pleasure. When listening to singing he prefers the corporeal “grain of voice” to expressiveness, meaning, or articulation’.
In this book Culler describes Barthes as a fixed figure or an intentionally thinker. Barthes wrote the society as the myth, in the same way Barthes and his works are myth constructed and consumed by people, society and Barthes himself.
This Culler’s introduction to Barthes, one of few english commentary book about Roland Barthes for beginners.
Barthes (A Very Short Introduction)
Jonathan Culler
Oxford University Press, Oxford, May 16 2002
152pp $11.95
ISBN: 978-0-19-280159-3
Contents:
Preface to This Edition
List of Illustrations
1. Man of Parts
2. Literary Historian
3. Mythologist
4. Critic
5. Polemicist
6. Semiologist
7. Structuralist
8. Hedonist
9. Writer
10. Man of Letters
11. Barthes after Barthes
Notes and References
Further Reading
Index
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