‘To read through A Barthes Reader is finally to be left with the image of Barthes as one of the great public teachers of our time’ New Republic
Edited by Susan Sontag, A Roland Barthes Reader offers a definitive selection of works by the French intellectual Roland Barthes, including seminal essays, such as 'Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives' as well as his more unusual works, such as 'The World of Wrestling'.
'At last, with A Barthes Reader, we have a sort of Michelin guide to one of the most beguiling minds of our era. Smartly introduced by Susan Sontag, the Reader samples Barthes' achievement over three decades' Newsweek
"Roland Barthes must be counted the most characteristic and important French intellectual of the structuralist generation that gained worldwide attention starting in the 1960s. By the time of his death in 1980 at age sixty-five–when he was still very much in the midst of a rich and evolving literary career–he was a best-selling author and professor at the College de France, that pinnacle of French intellectual institutions. Yet Barthes as intellectual authority–maitre a penser, as the French tend to say–cut a curious figure. He detested all forms of authority, worried about the power wielded by the teacher, and described his main subject, literature, as 'a grand imposture which allows us to understand speech outside the bounds of power, in the splendor of a permanent revolution of language.' His temperament and intellectual style were elegant, abstruse, refined, slightly mandarin. He could be assertive, but always in the mode of counterstatement, affirming the inverse of society's accepted dogmas and myths....
To read through A Barthes Reader is finally to be left with the image of Barthes as one of the great public teachers of our time, someone who thought out, argued for, and made available several steps in a penetrating reflection on language sign systems, texts–and what they have to tell us about the concept of being human. His workis always partial, passionate underneath its cool, and preliminary, ready to be superseded or contradicted, perhaps in the next essay by Barthes himself. Yet its pedagogical power is durable... Susan Sontag has contributed a prefatory essay which is one of her finest acts of criticism, informed by intellectual sympathy and a sure sense of the contours of the mind she is describing." – Peter Brooks, Yale University
