Barthes: A Very Short Introduction

Very Short Introductions #056

by Jonathan D. Culler

Roland Barthes was the leading figure of French Structuralism, the theoretical movement of the 1960s which revolutionized the study of literature and culture, as well as history and psychoanalysis. But Barthes was a man who disliked orthodoxies. His shifting positions and theoretical interests make him hard to grasp and assess. This book surveys Barthes' work in clear, accessible prose, highlighting what is most interesting and important in his work today. In particular, the book describes the many projects, which Barthes explored and which helped to change the way we think about a range of cultural phenomena--from literature, fashion, wrestling, and advertising to notions of the self, of history, and of nature.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Literary Criticism, Biography, Literature, France

160 pages, Paperback

First published May 19, 1983

About the author

Culler's Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature won the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association of America in 1976 for an outstanding book of criticism. Structuralist Poetics was one of the first introductions to the French structuralist movement available in English.

Culler’s contribution to the Very Short Introductions series, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, received praise for its innovative technique of organization. Instead of chapters to schools and their methods, the book's eight chapters address issues and problems of literary theory.

In The Literary in Theory (2007) Culler discusses the notion of Theory and literary history’s role in the larger realm of literary and cultural theory. He defines Theory as an interdisciplinary body of work including structuralist linguistics, anthropology, Marxism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism.

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here in the UK we don’t like to think very hard but in France they think all the time about everything. Roland Barthes was one of those big names, impressively fleet-footed, terrifyingly gnomic.

But he brings good news for us bookish types:

The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.

The idea here is that it is no longer the author who produces meaning but the reader. And furthermore, there is no meaning in a work like a novel anyway. Any work is like an onion

A construction of layers whose body contains, finally, no heart, no kernel, no secret, no irreducible principle, nothing except the infinity of its own envelopes which envelop nothing other than the unity of its own surfaces.

Something else that I thought you might want to bear in mind when reading, say, Clarissa by Samuel Richardson :

Boredom is not far from ecstasy, it is ecstasy viewed from the shores of pleasure.

I had read this short solid guide to Barthes years ago & rereading it did make me shudder more than somewhat.

[Marc Lamot · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a successful attempt to comprehensively convey the thinking of a chameleon such as the French (post)structuralist Roland Barthes (1915-1980). Jonathan Culler nicely separates the different aspects of Barthes' personality and work and also sketches the evolution he went through. He is not afraid to point to the contradictions in that work and he clearly expresses his preference for the systematic scientist that Barthes was at the start of his career, the semiotic, in comparison with the multiformity of his later oeuvre. Because indeed, that Barthes once announced "the death of the author", but at the end of his career returned to a penetrating study of authors such as Flaubert and Proust, and came to revaluatie good old 'bourgeois' subjectivism, can provoke astonishment. But Culler makes clear that although Barthes may be placed in the list of structuralists such as Levi-Strauss, Foucault and Lacan, he always remained his wayward self. The only thing I missed in this booklet was the link that can clearly be found between French semiotics and what is called "the linguistic turn" in Anglo-Saxon countries (Hayden White and others).
PS. I read this short introduction because I began to read Laurent Binet La Septième Fonction du langage, a philosophical thriller around the death of Barthes. To my great surprise I just noticed that also Jonathan Culler, the author of this introduction, is a minor character in this novel!

[hayatem · Rating 4 out of 5]

يقول بارت صراحة: «ليس لديَّ سيرة حياة، أو بالأحرى، منذ اليوم الذي خططت فيه أول سطوري، لم أُعْد أرى نفسي.» ص101

في هذا الكتاب يصوغ كولر مسيرة بارت الخصبة، مستعرضاً أهم كتاباته؛ (أسطوريات)، (الكتابة في الدرجة الصفر)، (شذرات من خطاب في العشق)، (ص،ز )، ( بارت بقلم بارت)، ( الغرفة المضيئة).
وطريقته في الكتابة بتحولاتها بين أنساق ومعاني تاريخية، ثقافية ومنهجية، ونظرية، لم تخلو من ذاتية بارت المنقلبة على ذاتها.

يكشف كولر من خلال هذه الدراسة السنوغرافية الأنثروبولوجية، الكثير عن شخص بارت الإنسان، وبارت المهني، في صوره المتعددة؛ بارت الناقد، الجدلي ، السيميوطيقي ،البنيوي ، المُتعيُّ ، الكاتب ، الأديب، وأخيراً بارت بعد بارت.
وما ميز بارت في تعدده الفكري المفاهيمي والمنهجي ليخلق منه علامة فارقة في الفكر والوجدان.
بارت المنقلب على كل نسق ونمط فكري تقليدي ونظري، بل معارضته لجميع الأنساق ( يسعى دائماً إلى خلخلة العقيدة الثابتة للمثقفين)، والكاره للاختزال؛ يقول بارت في الغرفة المضيئة" فيما يخصني، فإن الشيء الوحيد المؤكد هو مقاومتي المستميتة لكل نسق اختزالي." والباحث عن العلامة والمعنى في مثالب اللغة، خالقاً رؤًى وصوراً جديدة لتفاصيل حياتنا ، وأشيائنا الصغيرة التي قلما نلتفت لها بهذا الانتباه اللافت. حتى انه في كتاباته كان ينقلب على نظرياته الخاصة فيما بعد! " يتمثل تأثيره، على وجه الدقة، في إثنائنا عن تناول كتاباته ووضعها موضع الاختبار، واستخدامها لنرى ما يمكن أن تفعله بالنسبة إلى الممارسات والموضوعات الثقافية التي نهتم بتحليلها." ص126
فهو يشجع القارئ لكتاباته على التفكير خارج نطاق الآراء السائدة ، كما يحفزنا على المغامرات الفكرية.

"إحدى السمات الجوهرية لعبقرية بارت هي اكتشافه الوظيفة الإرشادية للنزعةالمنهجية والحاجةإلى الوضوح. وتحديدًا عندما كان يسعى لصياغة نظرية أوتحليل منهجي لشيءٍ ما، فإنه كان يتجه، بفعل هذاالإجراء، إلى تناول مشكلات وموضوعات وعناصر في الخطاب يتم إغفالها عادًة." ص126
….. "انه يحاول القيام بشيء أكثر جذرية، في محاولته لتفريغ المعنى أو تعليقه عن طريق إحباط افتراضاتنا عن المعقولية وقطع الطريق على تحركاتنا التفسيرية المعتادة." ،….لكنه مغرم؛فهو يخلق معانَي من لاشيء،في كل مكان، والمعنى هو ما يفتنه؛ إنه أسير محنة المعنى. ص98

كتاب جميل يقدم لك بارت السيموطيقي في صورة شبه كاملة في المتعدد، ستودالتعرف عليه أكثر.

[Nahed.E · Rating 3 out of 5]

القراءة الأولي عن رولان بارت ..
ولكني توقعت أن اجد المزيد عنه في هذه المقدمة ..
نعم من المفترض أنها مقدمة قصيرة جدا، ولكنها غير واضحة بما يكفي ..
وجدت أن القراءة بقلم بارت أفضل بكثير من القراءة عنه من المراجع وأقلام المؤلفين والباحثين ..
نصيحتي : إذا أردت أن تعرف عن بارت أكثر وأوضح أقرأ مصادره بقلمه هو لا بقلم غيره
~~

[Justin Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

Culler's introduction to Barthes is better than Barthes' actual ideas; the older Roland got the more nonsensical and silly his ideas got... and then he got hit by a laundry truck, one of the silliest deaths in intellectual history. Culler's analysis is sympathetic but also critical. It might be a good idea for most intellectuals to read this, because his criticism of Barthes' late infatuation with 'the body' is relevant to so many of them/us: why bother going through ideology critique, why bother revealing the way that we all treat out beliefs about the world as natural facts about the world, if you're just going to base your thought on a quasi-natural concept like the body? Nice for you that you can hold onto that liberal-conservative world-view and justify it by such a 'radical' epistemology; not so nice for those who don't benefit from that liberal-conservative world-view.

This isn't a substitute for reading Barthes, but it did a good job of encouraging me to read Mythologies and S/Z. Not much more you could ask for from a meta-literary-critic.

[Katia N · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful introduction into the ideas of Roland Barthes written by Jonathan Culler, who himself is a literary theorist and wonderful writer. The book follows the evolution of Barthes as a thinker and briefly reviews his body of work. Understandably, Culler is more attracted to Barthes-theorist as opposed to the later Barthes -writer and hedonist. But he does not reveal his preference by the lack of details about the latter.

I took huge number of ideas from this little book. Here I would just stress one thing: everyone knows Barthes's "the Death of the author". But he also rejected the role of the story in the fiction. I never understood this dominating conviction, especially in the english speaking word, that people are able to see the world predominantly through the narrative (with its arch): a good book should tell the story; even a good image apparently should tell the story. I never think this way by myself. So it was quite refreshing that Barthes did not as well:

"Barthes saw in his ‘rejection of story, anecdote, psychology of motivation, and signification of objects’ a powerful questioning of our ordering of experience. Since . . . things are buried under the assorted meanings with which men, through sensibilities, through poetry, through different uses, have impregnated the name of each object, the novelist’s labour is in a sense cathartic: he purges things of the undue meaning men ceaselessly deposit upon them. How? Obviously by description. Robbe-Grillet thus produces descriptions of objects sufficiently geometrical to discourage any induction of poetic meaning and sufficiently detailed to break the fascination of the narrative. (Essais critiques, p. 199/ 198")

[G · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pasa con Barthes que fascina y desconcierta a la vez. De ahí sus defensores viscerales y sus detractores dogmáticos, ambos leyendo con un solo ojo. Lo mejor de esta introducción de Culler sería que no polariza, sino que parece insistir en esa inestabilidad a lo largo del libro, casi todo el libro. Describe y explica con precisión y claridad las múltiples identidades de Barthes. Está el semiólogo, el crítico, el historiador literario, el estructuralista, el hedonista, el mitologista, el escritor. Puro desplazamiento. Sujeto que rompe la sujeción. Entonces, si hay algo así como una identidad en juego, esa sería la del artista. Creo que el libro tomado en conjunto -casi- postula esa libertad como clave de la barthesidad. Sin embargo, tropieza Culler cuando dice hacia el final del libro que Barthes sería, en definitiva, un antropólogo de la vida cotidiana. Una especie de crítico de la cultura al estilo Adorno en versión post-estructuralista. Entonces, el Barthes cullerizado quedó al final desbartheszado.

[Nicky · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am, I confess, not very good with literary theory. It seems strange that an MA in English Lit can assert that, or maybe I just knew a lot of literary theorists, but it's the case. Still, now I'm TAing for the SF/F course on Coursera, I find myself debating literary theory and understanding it more through trying to explain it, and being more interested in it as well. So I've started with Barthes -- 'The Death of the Author', at least, I've always understood reasonably well -- and I've got the short introduction to Derrida as well.

Culler's introduction works reasonably well as a quick tour of Barthes' life, opinions, relevance, and even some of his sillier points and ideas. And it makes me want to cast my net a bit wider and pull in some Sartre too. Still, I can't say that it entirely converted me to literary theory -- even a summary of Barthes' ideas makes my head hurt a little at times.

[كريم الخالق · Rating 4 out of 5]

مدخل مناسب لكتابات رولان بارت

[Castles · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m not sure why this series of books tends to get such low reviews, but for me at least this book had its goal - a short introduction.

A little about the man and a little about his works and theories, and of course it’s only a drop in the sea.

[James Askari · Rating 4 out of 5]

Culler interprets Barthes's writing career as a succession of phases, each marked by an impatience with, and desire to overthrow, the systematic contribution, with its tendency to orthodoxy, of his earlier efforts. Barthes championed la nouvelle critique, an assemblage of approaches taking inspiration from psychoanalysis, structural linguistics, semiology, comparative anthropology and the study of myth, and came to embody it. His quarrel with French academic orthodoxies was that they permitted themselves an unexamined eclecticism of approach in analysing classical texts, whose meanings were taken to be self-evident, to redound to national glory or propriety, and to be unproblematically substantiated by a historical signified--the 'fact' of Jansenist ideology, for example, or the shape of Racine's career or character of his preoccupations. This criticism was concerned above all to demystify the givens of bourgeois ideology, in principle through a 'poetics' of the institutional practices of reading that make them possible--indeed render them inescapable (i.e., the designation of what exists, what is important, what literary; how literary references and formulations join). Culler is frustrated, to some degree, which how the end of Barthes's career, when he is complacently tenured at the College de France and has become a mass culture figure, tends to recuperate what his iconoclastic readings in Mythologies exposed. Photographs, for instance, purportedly lay bare the unmediated fact of slavery--something the earlier Barthes would never claim. The late insistence on pleasure and the bodily reintroduces subjectivity, while making the text the site of a radical instability (both suggesting practices of writing that perpetually threaten to efface the self and ineluctably constituting the self out of no more than figuration). This suggests that, by the end, Barthes had gone beyond any 'science' of interpretation he had once held out for; though, at the same time, it may just indicate how much the seeds of poststructuralism are latent with 60s structuralism, including the structural study of narrative, itself.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Roland Barthes stood at the crossroads of structularist and post-structuralist literary and cultural theory in the second half of the twentieth century. "French theory" can either be a call to arms or a slur depending on who is speaking. Barthes carries the flag for this movement in his own distinctive way. He was not maddenly opaque or over-burdened with jargon like Lacan, nor was he as overtly and doctrinaire-ly Marxist as Baudrillard. Potential readers were not as immediately defensive as they would be toward the French feminists Iragaray, Cixous, and Kristeva. Barthes is in some ways a cipher. He doesn't standout as strikingly in hindsight, and much of his fame has evaporated since the 70s.

Nevertheless, this book clearly shows how important he was as a writer and a thinker. His refusal to become as doctrinaire as many of his contemporaries allowed him to contradict himself and puzzle those who foolishly demand complete consisency from an author. But we all know, as we learned from Barthes, that the author is dead. Long live the text!

I would recomennd this book as an introduction to literary and cultural studies for anybody, whether you lean more towards the humanities or towards the sciences. The book doesn't attempt to paste over Barthes' imperfections as a writer and thinker, but still gives a great picture of what his writings bestowed on posterity. The insights and perspectives that he adopts over almost 30 years of writing have had such a strong impact that we take many of them for granted. New Criticism, semiotics, aesthetics, mythology, and literary history all owe a great deal to the work of Roland Barthes.

Another insight one can gain from this text is how distinct an impression Barthes has made on Culler's work. If you have read much of Culler's other work, you will find many of his own basic insights attributed here first to Barthes.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though it repeats itself in places, Culler's book offers a good appraisal of Barthes, including his life, contemporaries, and his major works/ideas. The book is divided into different identities that Barthes assumes (hedonist, writer, critic, etc) and struggles to put his major works in context with these positions; this is where some of the repetition comes from since the author must, in some ways, repeat himself since some of the identities necessarily overlap (mythologist/semiologist/structuralist). On the whole, this is a good, functional introduction to Barthes that should help launch anyone interested in the [man] into his corpus.

[Daniel Wright · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is distinguished as the first book related to literary theory that I didn't at any point want to throw across the room.

Chapter 1: Man of parts
Chapter 2: Literary historian
Chapter 3: Mythologist
Chapter 4: Critic
Chapter 5: Polemicist
Chapter 6: Semiologist
Chapter 7: Structuralist
Chapter 8: Hedonist
Chapter 9: Writer
Chapter 10: Man of letters
Chapter 11: Barthes after Barthes

[Hanadi Otaibi · Rating 5 out of 5]

رولان پارت ناقد حُر!
لم يكن پارت أسير نظرياته التي كان يُنادي بِها،ما استوقفني في شخصه بِأن پارت كان ناقِداً في المرتبة الأولى لآرائه الأدبيّة والفكريّة،انتقالاً من البنيويّة إلى السّيميائيك إلى المُتَعيّة الهادِمة في نظري لأيّ نظرية أُسّست قبلها.
والفارِق هُنا لا في وِلادة نظريّة تعارض سابقتها الفارِق والمُلفت هو توالد المُنظّر مع نظريته في كُل مرّة وبكل ما يحمِل من جُدّة.
پارت كان حُرّ حتّى من أفكاره! و هذا ما أعجبني جِداً ببارت

[L · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent survey of the various subjects Barthes studied and wrote on. It is useful as a literature review of Barthes' texts, by giving an overview of the significant works, but there is often a lack of engagement with the texts themselves. Culler tends to praise Barthes' writing regardless of subject matter, even if Barthes disagrees with himself or posits a contradictory argument, and this often leads to sterile discussions about a very controversial figure.

[Shahad qays · Rating 4 out of 5]

بين الكثير من الكتب المشوشة التي تتناول بارت، بالنسبة لمبتدئ هذا الكتاب الأفضل ليبدأ به

[Joseph Petrillo · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was considering which Barthes work to read first and I tried this introduction to get guidance. I found this a fascinating summary, but did not get a clear answer to my question. Apparently, Barthes wrote a series of conceptually very different and sometimes contradictory analyses of literature and culture. So there really isn't single work that one can call representative or even foundational. The author seems to do a great job of representing that variety and tying the works together, to the extent that can be done. I may still go forward, but if so, I will have to select which Barthes I want to read.

[M. Ashraf · Rating 2 out of 5]

Roland Barthes
I have to say I did not know who he was before reading this, and the book gives you some idea about the man, his life and ideas but it felt more like a wiki page than a very short introduction which suppose to be more than a wiki page!
He sounds interesting though and I might read one of his books in the future!

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

An introduction offers you an outline, a good introduction offers you the better understanding, a great introduction brings you to an interesting field that you would like to search further. This book sparked my interests in the works of Barthes. Thanks to author's objective review, I could have a real understanding of Barthes rather than the orientation under his high reputation.

[Rodrigo Mayorga · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesante, sin duda, porque las ideas de Barthes lo son, pero posee un gran problema: es mitad biografía, mitad análisis teórico de Barthes. El problema es que esta indefinición impide lograr exitosamente cubrir ambas dimensiones del libro. Probablemente un lector asiduo a Barthes y que conozca más profundamente su obra lo disfrutaría más.

[Alexand · Rating 4 out of 5]

افضل تعريف للأدب ان الادب لا يبوح عن مضمر لكن يعيد التكلم عن البديهي ’ يفضح النمط اسطوري الموجود في العمل الفني هو يولد الاسطورة نفهم من خلاله العالم , فالعالم لا يمتلك معنه الي داخل الرواية و السينما خاصة هذا سلاح جبار في خلق الاساطير الضمنية , بارت اقنعني بهيمة الاسطورة اعتقد نحتاج الي ادب في الدين اكثر من قراءة دينية الي سينما تشكل الحياة قديمة اكثر من هل سطحية موجودة

[Mohamed Karaly · Rating 4 out of 5]

كتاب عظيم، يناقش أعمال الناقد الأدبى البنيوى رولان بارت. ويبدو إنه هيكون محطة مهمة هاخد فيها وقفة وأفكر، المفروض أقرا ايه، وايه الشكل العام اللى مفروض تاخده خريطة قراياتى بعد كدة. لأن يبدو إن قراية كتاب زى دى جت متاخرة، وبالتالى فيه خطأ ما. ١

[Alexander Cruz · Rating 3 out of 5]

This little book about Roland Barthes is actually more clear to understand than Roland Barthes himself.

[Noor jamal · Rating 4 out of 5]

صبي جالس فوق سور منخفض، على جانب طريق، يتجاهله تمامًا، جالس هناك كأنه للأبد، جالس هناك من أجل الجلوس، بلا مداورة :

(جالس في سلام، من غير شيء يفعله
يأتي الربيه وينمو العشب من تلقاء نفسه) .

[Ibook]

التعريف بشخصية رولان بارت
من جميع النواحى

[Greg Hovanesian · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars: I read most of this book while on a train to Harrisburg, PA: it was fascinating to read about Barthes and his thoughts on literature, in particular the early parts of the book.

[Jay Rothermel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Culler does an excellent job keeping up with Barthes, who never rested long on any intellectual perch. "Marxism"> semiology > structuralism > subjective essayist.

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Helped to demythologize Barthes for me
Ba dum chh
🥁

[Joshua Friesen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love these short introduction books. If you're not sure of interest in a topic just read a snippet to try it out.