“Roland Barthes (Routledge Critical Thinkers)” by Graham Allen is an one of few english 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 bold influences to humanities, social science, sociology, literary study, literary critic, philosophy and social thought.
This book is a introduction to Roland Barthes and his works. The chapters in this book, also register a certain chronology, and Barthes’s career is divided by four periods, moving from Barthes’ early phase of thought in Chapter 1 and 2, through his work on semiology and structuralism in Chapter 3 and 4, onto his poststructuralism phase in Chapter 5 and 6, and finally onto a set of issues emerging from his later writings (Barthes’ interest and writing about theoretical approaches to texts, music, photography and movie) from Chapter 7 to 9.
Allen traces Barthes’s transition of thought and life along with backgrounds from Marxism, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson to post-structuralism, Jaques Derrida, Mikhail Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva and so on. And Allen explains semiological terms and philosophical term by difference between Barthes’s and traditional means or other thinkers’. Also Graham Allen is a lecturer of text theory, so he describe Barthes as a literature critic and text theorist (the ‘texts’ includes language, literature, bourgeois society, music, photography and Roland Barthes himself) rather than an écrivain, structuralism philosopher, semiologist and sociologist.
The feature of this books is a concentrate on commentaries on Barthes’s text theory and literary analysis such as narrative analysis, zero degree writing, ‘myth’, intertextuality, neutral writing, hedonism, stadium/punctum and pheno-text/geno-text.
Another feature is a commentary on “Camera Lucida” of Barthes’s later life (Chapter 8 and 9), in which Barthes writing about music, photography and him life. Allen mentions Barthes’s last investigation reached the concept of ‘impossible’ practise of text. And Allen explains that ‘In “Camera Lucida” Barthes mixes theoretical writing with intense mourning for his mother in oder to present a text which exemplifies what is unrepeatable in his later writing. Barthes’s “Camera Lucida”, in pursuing an ‘impossible’ of practice of writing attempts to resist and defy the violence of language, which would turn his own mother into an archetype of the Mother. In performing such a personal act of writing, “Camera Lucida” offers to its readers many illuminating, if not immediately usable, insight into the nature of photography and representation generally’. Then Allen’s conclusion for Barthes’s activity is this. ’Writing for Barthes, is a meaning of perhaps, a meaning or perhaps, a disturbance of meaning rather than a production of meaning.’
This book is a basic, usual and total introduction to Roland Barthes and his theory, so it is the most useful book for beginners want to know about Roland Barthes especially his literally theory and text analysis.
Roland Barthes (Routledge Critical Thinkers)
Graham Allen
Routledge, Oxon, October 1 2003
192pp $24.95
ISBN: 0-415-26362-X
Contents:
Why Barthes?
Key Ideas
1. Writing and Literature
2. Critical Distance
3. Semiology
4. Structuralism
5. The Death of the Author
6. Texuality
7. Neutral Writing: Pleasure, Violence and the Novelistic
8. Music and Photography
9. Camera Lucida: the Impossible Text
After Barthes
Further Reading