Product Description: Parler de Racine, ce n est nullement proposer une vérité définitive de Racine, c´est participer à notre propre histoire en essayant sur Racine notre langage : celui qui est utilisé ici doit à la psychanalyse et au structuralisme, sans cependant prétendre les accomplir l une et l´autre...read more

Product Description: Ces Essais critiques sont un pan essentiel de la réflexion de Roland Barthes sur le théâtre et la littérature. Des auteurs classiques, comme Voltaire ou Baudelaire, y rencontrent des modernes, comme Queneau ou Robbe-Grillet ; mais il ne s’agit ni d’un palmarès ni d’une galerie d’exemples : du combat brechtien à « l’activité structuraliste », en passant par la naissance du « nouveau roman », se dessine ici le tracé d’une des expériences intellectuelles exemplaires de notre époque, qui est la découverte et l’exploration – à travers les domaines privilégiés de l’écriture littéraire et du langage théâtral – de cet inépuisable empire des signes, où la pensée moderne mesure son espace et son pouvoir...read more

Product Description: The essays in this volume were written during the years that its author's first four books were published in France. They chart the course of Barthe's criticism from the vocabularies of existentialism and Marxism (reflections on the social situation of literature and writer's responsibility before History) to a psychoanalysis of substances (after Bachelard) and a psychoanalytical anthropology (which evidently brought Barthes to his present terms of understanding with Levi-Strauss and Lacan)...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: In this appealing and luminous collection of essays, Roland Barthes examines the mundane and exposes hidden texts, causing the reader to look afresh at the famous landmark and symbol of Paris, and also at the Tour de France, the visit to Paris of Billy Graham, the flooding of the Seine—and other shared events and aspects of everyday experience...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: "Barthes's most popular and unusual performance as a writer is A Lover's Discourse, a writing out of the discourse of love. This language—primarily the complaints and reflections of the lover when alone, not exchanges of a lover with his or her partner—is unfashionable...read more

Product Description: New Critical gathers Roland Barthes's essays on classic texts of French literature, works by La Rochefoucauld, Chateaubriand, Proust, Flaubert, Fromentin, and Lori. Like an artist sketching, Barthes in these essays is working out the more fascinating details of his larger theories...read more

Fashion never ceases to interest psychologists, aestheticians and sociologists. Roland Barthes, however, examined fashion from a new point of view. Using descriptions from magazines, he uncovered a system of meaning and subjected it for the first time to semantic analysis. "The Fashion System", published in France in 1967, is bold and imaginative. In his endeavour to confine his love, outrage and passion for fashion to a system, Barthes created a work of literature that is witty, humane, personal and enormously stimulating.

Provides a broad sampling of the late French literary critic's most essential writings, including such works as Writing Degree Zero, Image-Music-Text, and New Critical Essays

An analysis of the culture of Japan includes discussions of haiku, cooking, Zen Buddhism, the custom of bowing, and the layout of cities