Masculine Feminine Neuter And Other Writings On Literature

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 SZ The Pleasure of the Text Camera Lucida Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. In 1976 the onetime structuralist outsider was elected to a chair at Frances preeminent 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 Barthess 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 Englishspeaking readers access to the most significant previously untranslated material from the various stages of Barthess career. It is divided not entirely scientifically into five themed volumes entitled Theory Politics Literary Criticism Signs and Images Art Cinema Photography and Interviews. Barthess earliest interest is in literaturein theatre and the classic realist novel but also in the more experimental writers of the 1940s and 50s literature of the absurd nouveau roman etc.. The articles translated in this volume run from his mid1950s writings on popular poetry the giants of the nineteenth century novel Hugo Maupassant Zola and the narrative innovations of RobbeGrillet and his associates through to writings from his later years on Sade Rousseau and Voltaire and the longer study Masculine Feminine Neuter which is in the words of his French editor the first outline of his remarkable critical work SZ.