Album: Unpublished Correspondence and Texts

by Roland Barthes, Jody Gladding (Translator)

Album provides an unparalleled look into Roland Barthes's life of letters. It presents a selection of correspondence, from his adolescence in the 1930s through the height of his career and up to the last years of his life, covering such topics as friendships, intellectual adventures, politics, and aesthetics. It offers an intimate look at Barthes's thought processes and the everyday reflection behind the composition of his works, as well as a rich archive of epistolary friendships, spanning half a century, among the leading intellectuals of the day.

Barthes was one of the great observers of language and culture, and Album shows him in his element, immersed in heady French intellectual culture and the daily struggles to maintain a writing life. Barthes's correspondents include Maurice Blanchot, Michel Butor, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marthe Robert, and Jean Starobinski, among others. The book also features documents, letters, and postcards reproduced in facsimile; unpublished material; and notes and transcripts from his seminars. The first English-language publication of Barthes's letters, Album is a comprehensive testimony to one of the most influential critics and philosophers of the twentieth century and the world of letters in which he lived and breathed.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

392 pages, Hardcover

Published February 13, 2018

About the author

Roland Barthes of France applied semiology, the study of signs and symbols, to literary and social criticism.

Ideas of Roland Gérard Barthes, a theorist, philosopher, and linguist, explored a diverse range of fields. He influenced the development of schools of theory, including design, anthropology, and poststructuralism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_...

Reviews

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of the letters are brief, but many are interesting, and give insight to Barthes's thinking.
Marty’s writing style and organization are excellent.

Very moving, the letter from the Chief of the Flotilla Division of the North Sea, about the combat death of Barthes’s father. Excerpt:
I told him that I regretted that I couldn’t compensate him as he deserved and as I would like. “... he answered me in such a way---with such dignity and simplicity and so loyal and fine a look---that his noble heart was clearly revealed to me and my eyes brimmed with tears of emotion; these visions matter in life and are not forgotten.”

Ayten Tartici’s review “In the Snatches of Free Time: On Collecting Roland Barthes” led to my reading.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/i...#