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List of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Understanding Barthes, Understanding Modernism
Jeffrey R. Di Leo (University of Houston, Victoria, USA) and Zahi Zalloua (Whitman College, USA)
Part I: Mapping Barthes
1 Roland Barthes’s Myth of Photography
Jean-Michel Rabaté (University of Pennsylvania, USA)
2. Barthes and the Search for Rigor
Thomas Pavel (University of Chicago, USA)
3. Barthes and the French Classics
Michael Moriarty (University of Cambridge, UK)
4. The Pleasure of Paradigm: Sade, Fourier, Loyola
Rudolphus Teeuwen (National Sun Yat-Sen University, Taiwan)
5. Understanding Barthes, Understanding Proust
Thomas Baldwin (University of Kent, UK)
6. Take Two: Barthes and Film in the Age of Mythologies
Steven Ungar (University of Iowa, USA)
7. Barthes, Bazin, and Écriture
Dudley Andrew (Yale University, USA)
8. Barthes’s Hedonism
Jeffrey R. Di Leo (University of Houston, Victoria, USA)
Part II: Legacies and Afterlives
9. Point Counterpoint: Derrida’s “The Deaths of Roland Barthes”
Brian O’Keeffe (Barnard College, USA
10. Objects of Desire: Chosisme after OOO
Zahi Zalloua (Whitman College, USA)
11. Orpheus Turning: The Reader to Come in Camera Lucida
Daniel T. O’Hara (Temple University, USA)
12. No Wish to “Understand” nor to “Grasp”: Opacity in the Work of Roland Barthes and Édouard Glissant
Andy Stafford (University of Leeds, UK)
13. Roland Barthes and Don DeLillo on Living Together/Apart
Herman Rappaport (Wake Forest University, USA)
14. Barthes: Visual Culture and Homosexual Sociabilities
Magali Nachtergael (University of Paris 13, France)
Part III: Glossary
15. Author
Andy Stafford (University of Leeds, UK)
16. Codes
Andy Stafford (University of Leeds, UK)
17. Haiku
Brian O’Keeffe (Barnard College, USA)
18. Jouissance
Andy Stafford (University of Leeds, UK)
19. The Neutral
Andy Stafford (University of Leeds, UK)
20. Readerly/Writerly
Warren Motte (University of Colorado Boulder, USA)
21. Sign
Dinda L. Gorlée (University of Bergen, Norway)
22. Semiology
Dinda L. Gorlée (University of Bergen, Norway)
23. Structuralism
Dinda L. Gorlée (University of Bergen, Norway)
24. Studium/Punctum
Andy Stafford (University of Leeds, UK)
25. Work/Text
Gerald Prince (University of Pennsylvania, USA)
Notes on Contributors
Index
About the author
Jeffrey R. Di Leo is Professor of English and Philosophy at the University of Houston-Victoria, USA . He is editor and founder of the critical theory journal symploke, editor-in-chief of American Book Review, and Executive Director of the Society for Critical Exchange and its Winter Theory Institute. He is author, editor, or co-editor of 40 books. His recent books include Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory: An Overview (2023), Out of Print (2024), and Happiness (2024).Zahi Zalloua is Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature and a Professor of Indigeneity, Race, and Ethnicity Studies at Whitman College and Editor of The Comparatist. His most recent work includes Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause: Indigeneity, Blackness, and the Promise of Universality (2023), Being Posthuman: Ontologies of the Future (2021), Žižek on Race: Toward an Anti- Racist Future (2020), Theory’s Autoimmunity: Skepticism, Literature, and Philosophy (2018), and Continental Philosophy and the Palestinian Question: Beyond the Jew and the Greek (2017).
Summary
Understanding Barthes, Understanding Modernism is a general assessment of the modern literary and philosophical contributions of Roland Barthes.
The first part of the volume focuses on work published prior to Barthes's death in 1980 covering the major periods of his development from Writing Degree Zero (1953) to Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1980). The second part focuses both on the posthumously published material and the legacies of his work after his death in 1980. This later work has attracted attention, for example, in conjunction with notions of the neutral, gay writing, and critiques of everyday life.
The third part is devoted to some of the critical vocabulary of Barthes in both the work he published during his lifetime, and that which was published posthumously.
Foreword
Explores and illuminates Roland Barthes' profound impact on our understanding of literary modernism.
Additional text
Reading Barthes means thinking about modernity in all its forms. Providing a panoramic account of Barthes’s engagement with literature, aesthetics, popular culture, and philosophy, the essays in this collection illuminate our understanding of Barthes’s multi-faceted thought and show how his insights continue to resonate and to inform inquiry across disciplinary boundaries.
