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dcossai's review against another edition
5.0
A good collection of essays by the ever-influential French theorist Roland Barthes. The translations are easy to understand.
elmyhelmos's review against another edition
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
4.25
yuefei's review against another edition
5.0
A provocative and exhilarating collection of essays, at once offering insights into structuralist semiotics and rushing in a paradoxical call for alternative ways of assessing signs, of displacing meaning. A gateway into the experimental potential of the essay, and "non-fiction" in general. Enjoyed the way in which Barthes constantly refutes and contradicts himself, sometimes in the same essay, to dilute the mythical authority of the intellectual figure and to reinforce in the reader a critical sensitivity. Definitely a challenging read, even more so with the references to Marxism and especially (mainly Lacanian) psychoanalysis. Really want to say that this is a life-changing book, as that is how I feel right now. I guess we'll see.
adamz24's review against another edition
3.0
Barthes is not as difficult as he initially seems to people [including myself]. The guy has what every great critic has: a sense of humour, pristine prose, and razor-sharp insight. And don't mistake him for a cut-and-dry New Critics-level formalist [I have nothing against them, let me note]; his reasoning is better and his ambitions greater. The New Critics can be seen as reductive in certain respects but if Barthes commits an act of apparent reduction, it is to open whole avenues of exploration [there are exceptions, but that is the rule]. The three really famous essays contained here are all worthy of their acclaim, especially "The Death of the Author," which has to be one of the most concise and cutting and connotation-packed essays in literary theory.
Barthes is frequently misinterpreted and the victim of prejudice, especially from the Anglo-American academy [to which I profess allegiance, btw], and like many other continental thinkers is often thought of as plenty more pretentious and, well, obnoxious, than he actually is. The best thing about Barthes' writing is that it is loose and non-conformist to the usual 'rules' of academic writing; while this tendency can make him harder to follow than the clearer philosophers and critics in the Anglo-American tradition, Barthes is a cut above most of his contemporary continental thinkers and deserves the attention, but scarcely the vitriolic attacks, he receives.
Barthes is frequently misinterpreted and the victim of prejudice, especially from the Anglo-American academy [to which I profess allegiance, btw], and like many other continental thinkers is often thought of as plenty more pretentious and, well, obnoxious, than he actually is. The best thing about Barthes' writing is that it is loose and non-conformist to the usual 'rules' of academic writing; while this tendency can make him harder to follow than the clearer philosophers and critics in the Anglo-American tradition, Barthes is a cut above most of his contemporary continental thinkers and deserves the attention, but scarcely the vitriolic attacks, he receives.
alexander0's review against another edition
2.0
I read a lot of Barthes all at once, and something that seems pretty clear is that this is, so far, the least clear thing I've read by him. I have no idea what the goal or organization of this work is.
That said, the first chapter is an excellent structuring of how to begin thinking about image analysis even if I wasn't entirely sold on all the details. It very simply introduces problems that still exist in image analysis.
That said, the first chapter is an excellent structuring of how to begin thinking about image analysis even if I wasn't entirely sold on all the details. It very simply introduces problems that still exist in image analysis.
jpfriday's review against another edition
5.0
“the adventure of language, the unceasing celebration of its coming.” I found “Image, Music, Text” while researching my thesis. Through Bond scenes, grocery ads, and Beethoven symphonies, Roland Barthes teases out the weird magic of seeing, hearing, and interacting with culture. The writing is dense and knotty – Barthes trained as a linguist – but the ideas are insightful. His explorations of “the infinity of language” and how photographs are “floating chains of signifieds” are indeed adventurous, lingering with you like charge in the air.
sew's review against another edition
I just couldn't get through this. I'm not having a lot of luck with essay collections lately.
george_r_t_c's review against another edition
4.0
I think like many people I first read "The Death of the Author" as a stand-alone essay a while before taking the time to engage with Barthes' project -- it's easy to take that particular essay as a kind of synecdochic stand-in for the whole of Barthes' work, and also to slide immediately from the death of the author and the refusal of "God and his hypostases - reason, science, law" into poststructuralism. (147). But trite as this may be to point out, the other essays are also good.
I think "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives" is actually the heart of this book, its longest and most systematic essay. It could be read as a less provocative version of "The Death of the Author." It also pairs very well with "The Struggle with the Angel," which I actually thought was the most enjoyable essay in here. He clarifies that his reactions to this text are those "of a reader today," which means he approaches the biblical passage in a way that reproduces certain impressions and reactions that we can much more easily recognise in ourselves, even if he works them out in sophisticated detail. This is partly a consequence of an approach that as he admits is only the working out of a new system of analysis, maybe even one that just collages "what is being developed round about him" (164). He is staking out new ground in the practice of reading and you can follow his process pretty closely and with a reasonable degree of satisfaction even 50 years later.
I feel like the essays that deal with music -- "Musica Practica" and in particular "The Grain of the Voice" - go underappreciated in the musicological sector of the academy. There's naturally a story about the slow speed at which musicology has paid attention to semiotics as a discipline, but it's interesting over and above this to read Barthes explicitly make the claim in 1972 that "the simple consideration of 'grain' in music could lead to a different history of music," a history that would totally recast the centrality of tonality to musical history (189). Like, he just comes out and says this; no need for a musicologist to 'draw interdisciplinarily' on his work, they could just read it. To be fair, 'grain' is an unusual concept for literary theory too, thus the innovativeness of Barthes for all who read him, but it's interesting that he effectively develops this concept out of an immanent problem with music criticism, the problem of music criticism's reliance on the 'adjective,' on its inability to analyse music in a way that moves beyond a superficial paradigm of representation. 'Grain' means here the gap that opens up between the music and the language - as if they were recto and verso of a sheet of paper called 'lied' - or in other words the gap between the level of the sign (what I have called the paradigm of representation) and the underlying level of the pure signifiers, its physical dimension. There's maybe an interesting unstated similarity between the concept of grain and the layers of meaning that Barthes identifies in the first two essays in this collection about the photograph; the opening up of a grain is analogous to the opening up of the photograph into its linguistic or cultural messages and its "photograph message," which, perhaps like the grain, is a message without a code (17). This grain admits of an erotics but is also the domain for the application of a more systematic structural investigation, which would be not just a solution to one of music criticism's big problems but which was also a historical moment of development for the history of literary criticism. So literary criticism was listening to the innovations of music criticism, one might say, while musicology was not reciprocating!
I think "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives" is actually the heart of this book, its longest and most systematic essay. It could be read as a less provocative version of "The Death of the Author." It also pairs very well with "The Struggle with the Angel," which I actually thought was the most enjoyable essay in here. He clarifies that his reactions to this text are those "of a reader today," which means he approaches the biblical passage in a way that reproduces certain impressions and reactions that we can much more easily recognise in ourselves, even if he works them out in sophisticated detail. This is partly a consequence of an approach that as he admits is only the working out of a new system of analysis, maybe even one that just collages "what is being developed round about him" (164). He is staking out new ground in the practice of reading and you can follow his process pretty closely and with a reasonable degree of satisfaction even 50 years later.
I feel like the essays that deal with music -- "Musica Practica" and in particular "The Grain of the Voice" - go underappreciated in the musicological sector of the academy. There's naturally a story about the slow speed at which musicology has paid attention to semiotics as a discipline, but it's interesting over and above this to read Barthes explicitly make the claim in 1972 that "the simple consideration of 'grain' in music could lead to a different history of music," a history that would totally recast the centrality of tonality to musical history (189). Like, he just comes out and says this; no need for a musicologist to 'draw interdisciplinarily' on his work, they could just read it. To be fair, 'grain' is an unusual concept for literary theory too, thus the innovativeness of Barthes for all who read him, but it's interesting that he effectively develops this concept out of an immanent problem with music criticism, the problem of music criticism's reliance on the 'adjective,' on its inability to analyse music in a way that moves beyond a superficial paradigm of representation. 'Grain' means here the gap that opens up between the music and the language - as if they were recto and verso of a sheet of paper called 'lied' - or in other words the gap between the level of the sign (what I have called the paradigm of representation) and the underlying level of the pure signifiers, its physical dimension. There's maybe an interesting unstated similarity between the concept of grain and the layers of meaning that Barthes identifies in the first two essays in this collection about the photograph; the opening up of a grain is analogous to the opening up of the photograph into its linguistic or cultural messages and its "photograph message," which, perhaps like the grain, is a message without a code (17). This grain admits of an erotics but is also the domain for the application of a more systematic structural investigation, which would be not just a solution to one of music criticism's big problems but which was also a historical moment of development for the history of literary criticism. So literary criticism was listening to the innovations of music criticism, one might say, while musicology was not reciprocating!