"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 College 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...

The Rustle of Language is a collection of forty-five essays, written between 1967 and 1980, on language, literature, and teaching--the pleasure of the text--in an authoritative translation by Richard Howard.

In his consideration of the language of the fashion magazine--the structural analysis of descriptions of women's clothing by writers about fashion--Barthes gives us a brief history of semiology. At the same time, he identifies economics as the underlying reason for the luxuriant prose of the fashion magazine: "Calculating, industrial society is obliged to form consumers who don't calculate; if clothing's producers and consumers had the same consciousness, clothing would be bought (and produced) only at the very slow rate of its dilapidation."

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).

A Barthes Reader gives one 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. Susan Sontag's prefatory essay 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.

S/Z is the linguistic distillation of Barthes's system of semiology, a science of signs and symbols, in which a Balzac novella, Sarrasine, is dissected semantically in order to uncover layers of unsuspected meanings and connotations. In the process, Barthes reveals the immeasurably fecund nature of language. His interpretation of language and meaning within the structuralist mode offers an altogether new and exciting vision of ageworn ideas, and stands, in 20th century thought, alongside Levi-Strauss's work in anthropology.

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...

Dieser Band versammelt die lange vergriffenen Einzelwerke Am Nullpunkt der Literatur, Literatur oder Geschichte und Kritik und Wahrheit aus der frhen Periode des Barthesschen Werkes und macht sie wieder zugnglich. Hier wird der zentrale Begriff der ecriture, der Schreibweise, entfaltet, wird die klassisch gewordene Unterscheidung zwischen ecrivain und ecrivant, zwischen Schriftsteller und Schreiber getroffen; hier wird ein Umgang mit Literatur erprobt, der Begriffe und Mglichkeiten einer Kritik literarischer Texte aus dem Geist des Strukturalismus entfaltet. In ihrer stilistischen Brillanz,...

1976 wurde Roland Barthes an das renommierte College de France gewhlt. Zu seinen Aufgaben gehrte eine wchentliche Vorlesung, in der er aus seiner aktuellen Forschung berichtete. Im akademischen Jahr 1977/78 behandelte Barthes das Neutrale, den dritten Begriff, der die binre Opposition - das klassische Ordnungsprinzip des Strukturalismus - unterluft. Das Neutrale entzieht sich der Spannung und dem Konflikt und lt sich in zahlreichen Phnomenen wiederfinden: in der Mdigkeit, der Stille, in sozialen Bildern wie dem Apolitischen, in Haltungen wie dem Skeptizismus sowie schlielich im Sexuellen, in...