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.

A major collection of essays and interviews from an iconic 20th-century philosopher in five volumes, now all available together in paperback.   Roland Barthes 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 essays on mass culture and then went on to produce some of the most suggestive and stimulating cultural criticism of the late twentieth century, including Empire of Signs, The Pleasure of the Text, and Camera Lucida. In 1976, this one-time structuralist outsider was elected to a chair at France’s preeminent Collège de France, where he chose to style himself as a professor of literary semiology until his death in 1980.   The greater part of Barthes’s published writings has been available to a French audience since 2002, but now, translator Chris Turner presents a collection of essays, interviews, prefaces, book reviews, and other journalistic material for the first time in English and divided into five themed volumes. In volume one, A Very Fine Gift, Barthes attempts to frame his lifelong curiosities in theoretical form, from his early musings on the sociology of literature through his high period of structuralism to his later reflections on Derrida.

A major collection of essays and interviews from an iconic 20th-century philosopher in five volumes, now all available together in paperback.   Roland Barthes 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 essays on mass culture and then went on to produce some of the most suggestive and stimulating cultural criticism of the late twentieth century, including Empire of Signs, The Pleasure of the Text, and Camera Lucida. In 1976, this one-time structuralist outsider was elected to a chair at France’s preeminent Collège de France, where he chose to style himself as a professor of literary semiology until his death in 1980.   The greater part of Barthes’s published writings has been available to a French audience since 2002, but now, translator Chris Turner presents a collection of essays, interviews, prefaces, book reviews, and other journalistic material for the first time in English and divided into five themed volumes. Volume two, The “Scandal� of Marxism, contains a wide range of his more overtly political writings, with an emphasis on his early work and the serious national turbulence in the French 1950s.

Album provides an unparalleled look into Roland Barthes's life of letters. It presents a selection of correspondence, from his adolescence in the 1930s through the height of his career and up to the last years of his life, covering such topics as friendships, intellectual adventures, politics, and aesthetics. It offers an intimate look at Barthes's thought processes and the everyday reflection behind the composition of his works, as well as a rich archive of epistolary friendships, spanning half a century, among the leading intellectuals of the day. Barthes was one of the great observers of language and culture, and Album shows him in his element, immersed in heady French intellectual culture and the daily struggles to maintain a writing life. Barthes's correspondents include Maurice Blanchot, Michel Butor, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Claude Levi-Strauss, Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marthe Robert, and Jean Starobinski, among others. The book also features documents, letters, and postcards reproduced in facsimile; unpublished material; and notes and transcripts from his seminars. The first English-language publication of Barthes's letters, Album is a comprehensive testimony to one of the most influential critics and philosophers of the twentieth century and the world of letters in which he lived and breathed.

"A Lover's Discourse," at its 1978 publication, was revolutionary: Roland Barthes made unprecedented use of the tools of structuralism to explore the whimsical phenomenon of love. Rich with references ranging from Goethe's "Werther "to Winnicott, from Plato to Proust, from Baudelaire to Schubert, "A Lover's Discourse "artfully draws a portrait in which every reader will find echoes of themselves.

Last season, Seagull Books published the first three volumes in a new series collecting essays and interviews by the late French thinker Roland Barthes. This season they'll bring the five-volume set to completion with the publication of "Masculine, Feminine, Neuter" and Signs and Images. "Masculine, Feminine, Neuter," consists of Barthes's writing on literature, covering his peers and influences, writers in French and other languages, contemporary and historical writers, and world literature. This volume comprises Barthes critical articles and interviews previously unavailable in English. Taken together, the five volumes in this series are a gift to Barthes' many fans, helping to round out our understanding of this restless, protean thinker and his legacy.

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 essays on mass culture and then went on to produce some of the most suggestive and stimulating cultural criticism of the late twentieth century, including Empire of Signs, The Pleasure of the Text, and Camera Lucida. In 1976, this one time structuralist outsider was elected to a chair at France's preeminent College de France, where he chose to style himself as professor of literary semiology until his death in 1980. The greater part of Barthes's published writings have been available to a French audience since 2002, but here, translator Chris Turner presents a collection of essays, interviews, prefaces, book reviews, and other journalistic material for the first time in English. Divided into five themed volumes, readers are presented in volume five, 'Simply a Particular Contemporary': Interviews, with four interviews Barthes conducted between 1970 and 1979, varying widely in style and content.

Album provides an unparalleled look into Roland Barthes's life of letters. It presents a selection of correspondence, from his adolescence in the 1930s through the height of his career and up to the last years of his life, covering such topics as friendships, intellectual adventures, politics, and aesthetics. It offers an intimate look at Barthes's thought processes and the everyday reflection behind the composition of his works, as well as a rich archive of epistolary friendships, spanning half a century, among the leading intellectuals of the day. Barthes was one of the great observers of language and culture, and Album shows him in his element, immersed in heady French intellectual culture and the daily struggles to maintain a writing life. Barthes's correspondents include Maurice Blanchot, Michel Butor, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Claude Levi-Strauss, Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marthe Robert, and Jean Starobinski, among others. The book also features documents, letters, and postcards reproduced in facsimile; unpublished material; and notes and transcripts from his seminars. The first English-language publication of Barthes's letters, Album is a comprehensive testimony to one of the most influential critics and philosophers of the twentieth century and the world of letters in which he lived and breathed.

A major collection of essays and interviews from an iconic 20th-century philosopher in five volumes, now all available together in paperback.   Roland Barthes 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 essays on mass culture and then went on to produce some of the most suggestive and stimulating cultural criticism of the late twentieth century, including Empire of Signs, The Pleasure of the Text, and Camera Lucida. In 1976, this one-time structuralist outsider was elected to a chair at France’s preeminent Collège de France, where he chose to style himself as a professor of literary semiology until his death in 1980.   The greater part of Barthes’s published writings has been available to a French audience since 2002, but now, translator Chris Turner presents a collection of essays, interviews, prefaces, book reviews, and other journalistic material for the first time in English and divided into five themed volumes. Volume four, Signs and Images, gathers pieces related to his central concerns—semiotics, visual culture, art, cinema, and photography—and features essays on Marthe Arnould, Lucien Clergue, Daniel Boudinet, Richard Avedon, Bernard Faucon, and many more. 

'Mythologies' is a series of essays on the codings that command our daily life, from hairstyles in the film 'Julius Caesar' to glossy photographs of gourmet cooking, to the cult of foam in detergents.

A graceful, contemplative volume, "Camera Lucida "was first published in 1979. Commenting on artists such as Avedon, Clifford, Mapplethorpe, and Nadar, Roland 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."

The language we use when we are in love is not a language we speak, for it is addressed to ourselves and to our imaginary beloved. It is a language of solitude, of mythology, of what Barthes calls an 'image repertoire'. This book revives - beyond the psychological or clinical enterprises which have characterised such researches in our culture - the notion of the amorous subject. It will be enjoyed and understood by two groups of readers: those who have been in love (Or thing they have, which is the same thing), and those who have never been in love (or think they have not, which is the same thing).

This book might be considered, in its restless search for authorities and examples, which range from Nietzsche to Zen, from Ruysbroek to Debussy, an encyclopaedia of that affirmative discourse which is the lover's.

"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.

Semiology is the science of signs and symbols, and their role in culture and society. Writing Degree Zero is Barthes' introduction to his field of study, the basic definitions required in the analysis of speech, language, writing and style, delivered with a poet's insight from one of France's most famous literary critics . In Elements of Semiology Barthes presented a concise scientific definition of Saussurean linguistics and their aftermath. Published in 1967, this is a key text in the study of 'structuralism', which at that time was a relatively new critical movement rapidly gaining an international following.

A major collection of essays and interviews from an iconic 20th-century philosopher in five volumes, now all available together in paperback.   Roland Barthes 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 essays on mass culture and then went on to produce some of the most suggestive and stimulating cultural criticism of the late twentieth century, including Empire of Signs, The Pleasure of the Text, and Camera Lucida. In 1976, this one-time structuralist outsider was elected to a chair at France’s preeminent Collège de France, where he chose to style himself as a professor of literary semiology until his death in 1980.   The greater part of Barthes’s published writings has been available to a French audience since 2002, but now, translator Chris Turner presents a collection of essays, interviews, prefaces, book reviews, and other journalistic material for the first time in English and divided into five themed volumes. Volume three, Masculine, Feminine, Neuter, consists of his writing on literature, covering his peers and influences, writers in French and other languages, contemporary and historical writers, and world literature. 

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

In "The Preparation of the Novel," a collection of lectures delivered at a defining moment in Roland Barthes's career (and completed just weeks before his death), the critic spoke of his struggle to discover a different way of writing and a new approach to life. "The Neutral" preceded this work, containing Barthes's challenge to the classic oppositions of Western thought and his effort to establish new pathways of meaning. "How to Live Together" predates both of these achievements, a series of lectures exploring solitude and the degree of contact necessary for individuals to exist and create at their own pace. A distinct project that sets the tone for his subsequent lectures, "How to Live Together" is a key introduction to Barthes's pedagogical methods and critical worldview.

In this work, Barthes focuses on the concept of "idiorrhythmy," a productive form of living together in which one recognizes and respects the individual rhythms of the other. He explores this phenomenon through five texts that represent different living spaces and their associated ways of life: ?mile Zola's "Pot-Bouille," set in a Parisian apartment building; Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain," which takes place in a sanatorium; Andr? Gide's "La S?questr?e de Poitiers," based on the true story of a woman confined to her bedroom; Daniel Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe," about a castaway on a remote island; and Pallidius's "Lausiac History," detailing the ascetic lives of the desert fathers.

As with his previous lecture books, "How to Live Together" exemplifies Barthes's singular approach to teaching, in which he invites his audience to investigate with him -- or for him -- and wholly incorporates his listeners into his discoveries. Rich with playful observations and suggestive prose, "How to Live Together" orients English-speaking readers to the full power of Barthes's intellectual adventures.

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 essays on mass culture and then went on to produce some of the most suggestive and stimulating cultural criticism of the late twentieth century, including Empire of Signs, The Pleasure of the Text, and Camera Lucida. In 1976, this one time structuralist outsider was elected to a chair at France's preeminent College de France, where he chose to style himself as professor of literary semiology until his death in 1980. The greater part of Barthes's published writings have been available to a French audience since 2002, but here, translator Chris Turner presents a collection of essays, interviews, prefaces, book reviews, and other journalistic material for the first time in English. Divided into five themed volumes, readers are presented in volume two, 'The "Scandal" of Marxism' and Other Writings on Politics, with a wide range of Barthes's more overtly political writings, with an emphasis on his early work and the serious national turbulence in the French 1950s.

"I define the Neutral as that which outplays the paradigm, or rather I call Neutral everything that baffles paradigm." With these words, Roland Barthes describes a concept that profoundly shaped his work and was the subject of a landmark series of lectures delivered in 1978 at the Coll?ge de France, just two years before his death. Not published in France until 2002, and appearing in English for the first time, these creative and engaging lectures deepen our understanding of Roland Barthes's intellectual itinerary and reveal his distinctive style as thinker and teacher.

The Neutral ( "le neutre"), as Barthes describes it, escapes or undoes the paradigmatic binary oppositions that structure and produce meaning in Western thought and discourse. These binaries are found in all aspects of human society ranging from language to sexuality to politics. For Barthes, the attempt to deconstruct or escape from these binaries has profound ethical, philosophical, and linguistic implications.

"The Neutral" is comprised of the prewritten texts from which Barthes lectured and centers around 23 "figures," also referred to as "traits" or "twinklings," that are possible embodiments of the Neutral (sleep, silence, tact, etc.) or of the anti-Neutral (anger, arrogance, conflict, etc.). His lectures draw on a diverse set of authors and intellectual traditions, including Lao-tzu, Tolstoy, German mysticism, classical philosophy, Rousseau, Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, and John Cage. Barthes's idiosyncratic approach to his subjects gives the lectures a playful, personal, and even joyous quality that enhances his rich insights.

In addition to his reflections on a variety of literary and scholarly works, Barthes's personal convictions and the events of his life shaped the course and content of the lectures. Most prominently, as Barthes admits, the recent death of his mother and the idea of mourning shape several of his lectures.

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 essays on mass culture and then went on to produce some of the most suggestive and stimulating cultural criticism of the late twentieth century, including Empire of Signs, The Pleasure of the Text, and Camera Lucida. In 1976, this one time structuralist outsider was elected to a chair at France's preeminent College de France, where he chose to style himself as professor of literary semiology until his death in 1980. The greater part of Barthes's published writings have been available to a French audience since 2002, but here, translator Chris Turner presents a collection of essays, interviews, prefaces, book reviews, and other journalistic material for the first time in English. Divided into five themed volumes, readers are presented in volume one, 'A Very Fine Gift' and Other Writings on Theory, with Barthes's attempts to frame his lifelong curiosities in theoretical form, from his early musings on the sociology of literature through his high period of structuralism to his later reflections on Derrida.

"In his Course in General Linguistics, first published in 1916, Saussure postulated the existence of a general science of signs, or Semiology, of which linguistics would form only one part. Semiology, therefore aims to take in any system of signs, whatever their substance and limits; images, gestures, musical sounds, objects, and the complex associations of all these, which form the content of ritual, convention or public entertainment: these constitute, if not languages, at least systems of signification . . . The Elements here presented have as their sole aim the extraction from linguistics of analytical concepts which we think a priori to be sufficiently general to start semiological research on its way. In assembling them, it is not presupposed that they will remain intact during the course of research; nor that semiology will always be forced to follow the linguistic model closely. We are merely suggesting and elucidating a terminology in the hope that it may enable an initial (albeit provisional) order to be introduced into the heterogeneous mass of significant facts. In fact what we purport to do is furnish a principle of classification of the questions. These elements of semiology will therefore be grouped under four main headings borrowed from structural linguistics: I. Language and Speech; II. Signified and Signifier; III. Syntagm and System; IV. Denotation and Connotation."--Roland Barthes, from his Introduction

A poetic meditation on professional sport by one of the major figures of twentieth-century French Literature and thought, published in an elegant paperback gift edition A little-known gem, the text of Barthes's What Is Sport? was never reprinted in the Seuil editions of his Complete Works-neither the three-volume version nor the later five-volume edition. It is published here in a graceful and faithful English translation by Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Howard. Originally commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as the text for a documentary film directed by Hubert Aquin, What Is Sport? was written three years after the publication of Barthes's Mythologies (1957) and bears considerable resemblance to that work. Some of Barthes's best writing seems to have been inspired by popular culture. Once again blurring the distinction between high and low, the great French literary theorist muses philosophically on the question: What is sport? In investigating the phenomenon of sport, Barthes considers five national sports: bullfighting (Spain), car racing (America), cycling (France), hockey (Canada), and soccer (England). For Barthes, sport is spectacle and serves the primary social function that theater once did in antiquity, collecting a city or nation within a shared experience. The real pleasure of this book, however, lies less in its generalities than in its fleeting, strangely haunting moments of insight. It makes an appropriate gift for any sport enthusiast as well as those interested in the writing of Roland Barthes.

In The Preparation of the Novel, a collection of lectures delivered at a defining moment in Roland Barthes's career (and completed just weeks before his death), the critic spoke of his struggle to discover a different way of writing and a new approach to life. The Neutral preceded this work, containing Barthes's challenge to the classic oppositions of Western thought and his effort to establish new pathways of meaning. How to Live Together predates both of these achievements, a series of lectures exploring solitude and the degree of contact necessary for individuals to exist and create at their own pace. A distinct project that sets the tone for his subsequent lectures, How to Live Together is a key introduction to Barthes's pedagogical methods and critical worldview. In this work, Barthes focuses on the concept of "idiorrhythmy," a productive form of living together in which one recognizes and respects the individual rhythms of the other. He explores this phenomenon through five texts that represent different living spaces and their associated ways of life: Emile Zola's Pot-Bouille, set in a Parisian apartment building; Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, which takes place in a sanatorium; Andre Gide's La Sequestree de Poitiers, based on the true story of a woman confined to her bedroom; Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, about a castaway on a remote island; and Pallidius's Lausiac History, detailing the ascetic lives of the desert fathers. As with his previous lecture books, How to Live Together exemplifies Barthes's singular approach to teaching, in which he invites his audience to investigate with him-or for him-and wholly incorporates his listeners into his discoveries. Rich with playful observations and suggestive prose, How to Live Together orients English-speaking readers to the full power of Barthes's intellectual adventures.

Completed just weeks before his death, the lectures in this volume mark a critical juncture in the career of Roland Barthes, in which he declared the intention, deeply felt, to write a novel. Unfolding over the course of two years, Barthes engaged in a unique pedagogical experiment: he combined teaching and writing to "simulate" the trial of novel-writing, exploring every step of the creative process along the way. Barthes's lectures move from the desire to write to the actual decision making, planning, and material act of producing a novel. He meets the difficulty of transitioning from short, concise notations (exemplified by his favorite literary form, haiku) to longer, uninterrupted flows of narrative, and he encounters a number of setbacks. Barthes takes solace in a diverse group of writers, including Dante, whose La Vita Nuova was similarly inspired by the death of a loved one, and he turns to classical philosophy, Taoism, and the works of Francois-Rene Chateaubriand, Gustave Flaubert, Franz Kafka, and Marcel Proust. This book uniquely includes eight elliptical plans for Barthes's unwritten novel, which he titled Vita Nova, and lecture notes that sketch the critic's views on photography. Following on The Neutral: Lecture Course at the College de France (1977-1978) and a third forthcoming collection of Barthes lectures, this volume provides an intensely personal account of the labor and love of writing.