Roland Barthes

Now available in paperback, this is the first biography of Roland Barthes - one of the most important European intellectuals of the postwar years. Calvet provides a lively and engaging account of Barthes's life and work demonstrating his tremendous importance and influence in the second half of the twentieth century. Preliminary Note.

Preface: The Genealogical Silence.

1. A Ward of the Nation.

2. A Little Gentleman.

3. In Limbo.

4. Paris - Bucharest.

5. From Alexandria to Writing Degree Zero. .

6. The Theatre Years.

7. The Ecole, At Last.

8. Structures Do Not Take to the Streets.

9. Tel Quel.

10. The Collége de France.

11. An Unqualifiable Life, A Life without Quality.

12. The 'After Death'.

Notes.

Bibliography of Roland Barthes.

Index.

"Succinct, accesible and witty ... Calvet deftly sketches a unified portrait of the man and his work." Publishers Weekly

"Calvet admirably traverses the texts surrounding the life of the writer with sympathy and detached scholarship." Times Higher Education Supplement

"Well researched. Besides Barthes's depression after his mother's death ... and his cryptic allusions to his desire to write a literary work, several other "biographemes" evoked by Calvet are touching and telling; his love for Schumann's piano music, his "doodling", his cigars, his overeating, his frequent "boredom", the fragile yet firm "grain" of his voice. Calvet also approaches, with sensitivity, the importance of homosexuality to Barthes's life and work." Times Literary Supplement

"Calvet's biography is a wide stop-gap which ... succeeds in demonstrating that Roland Barthes was an utterly captivating individual." The Independent on Sunday

"Barthes has been fortunate in another way, for Calvet is an unfashionably courteous biographer." The Guardian

"Enjoyable ... it provides a good overview of an unexpectedly uncertain career." Radical Philosophy

"From Writing Degree Zero to the haunting late essays, Roland Barthes's astonishing critical intelligence lived its own life, and the story that a mrere Barthes biographer can hope to tell is likely to be banal and bathetic in comparison. Calvet in his compelling new book avoids this danger by giving the public face of Barthes's ideas a central role in his narrative." Malcolm Bowie, University of Oxford

Louis-Jean Calvet is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Provence, Aix-en-Provence. This is the first biography of Roland Barthes - one of the most important European intellectuals of the postwar years. In a lively and engaging account of Barthes's life and work, Calvet follows the brilliant semiotician from his provincial origins to his sudden death in 1980.

He describes Barthes's move to Paris as a child, where he lived with his mother in modest surroundings and constant hardship. He argues that the experience of having his academic prospects ruined by his illness at an early age remained a thorn in Barthes's flesh: until the end of his life his relationship with the academic world was never free of bitterness, even resentment.

Calvet retraces his years in Paris, Bucharest and Alexandria after the war. During this period Barthes gained access to intellectual circles and experienced his decisive encounter with modern linguistics, particularly with 'semiotics', which he helped to establish as a discipline through his work on everyday myths, fashion and literature.

Calvet discusses the whole range of Barthes's work as a critic and literary theorist, and demonstrates his tremendous importance and influence in the second half of the twentieth century.

Thoughtful and sensitive, this book provides a detailed portrait of Barthes's life, and a vivid reconstruction of the intellectual culture of postwar France.