Mireille Ribière

This comprehensive presentation of Roland Barthes’s work tracks his intellectual evolution, with particular emphasis on those areas where his influence is felt most strongly today. Key stages in Barthes’s intellectual itinerary are discussed in seven core chapters: Mythologies; Semiology; New criticism; Structuralism; Reader writer and text; Pleasure, the body and the self; and Photography. In each chapter concepts are contextualised so that the reader may understand the issues debated during the period under scrutiny, and the strength and originality of Barthes’s contribution to those debates surrounding cultural forms. The successive shifts in Barthes’s thought are also carefully explained and highlighted to avoid any confusion in the readers mind between concepts or theories developed at different stages. Another three chapters (Barthes in perspective; Barthes’s legacy; and Paradox: a way of thinking) offer an overview of Barthes’s career and a general assessment of his place in the intellectual landscape of the last fifty years.

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