“... and analysis. ‘Japan has afforded him’ – the author – ‘a situation of writing,’ Roland Barthes wrote in Empire of Signs. This situation is ‘one in which a certain disturbance of the person occurs, a subversion of earlier readings, a shock of meaning lacerated, extenuated to the point of its irreplaceable void.’ Japan, to put it in ...”

“... is wide, to Virginia Woolf, to William Gass, to Susan Sontag, to Lester Bangs and to Roland Barthes (his first and most important inspiration). Most practitioners regard essay-writing as a sideline – Davenport set store by his stories, so much less vital than his non-fictional prose – but Dillon sees ‘some version of the essay’ as ...”

“... for their intellectual discipline but was interested in feeling as much as abstraction. Writing of Roland Barthes, Calvino approved of his rigour but argued that his real genius was to have achieved it since his mind was one ‘whose only sure criterion was pleasure’. That combination of formal and sensual qualities is also characteristic of ...”

“... The starting-point for this study is Roland Barthes’s theoretical aphorism that the reader is properly the “writer” or “producer” of his text.’ By the end, it appears that the original author has changed places and become ‘the reader of his text’, while the critics go on writing it for him ...”

“... can be praised for its selection of essays, including particularly fine ones by Gérard Genette, Roland Barthes, Michael Riffaterre, and Todorov himself. A substantive collection that is not similarly guilty of sexism is Peter Caws’s issue of Social Research entitled ‘Current French Philosophy’.* In addition to exemplary essays such as Sarah ...”

“... definitions of criticism that see it ‘constructing a form of intelligibility for our time’ (Roland Barthes), as well as others that speak the language of natural desire, of psychopolitical imposition. That imposition occurs, and has immense influence, but it occurs precisely to the extent that pseudo-history dominates our consciousness of ...”

“... The Roland Mouret Galaxy dress was first shown in 2005 and immediately became a defining shape of its time. Partly, the dress was so successful because it was strict and yet curve-friendly, making it easy to look nice in. It had in it a tension and a contradiction. The cleverness of the tailoring, the 3D precision of the darts and seaming, always makes me think about the concave angles they use when designing stealth weaponry, except that in the case of the Mouret dress, obviously, the idea is not to be invisible, but the most spectacular creature in the room ...”

“... and subject: elegy and unrepeatable death. At first we may think we’re in a movie version of Roland Barthes’s theory of photography, where the still shot represents the irrefutable life of what is now dead, of what was always going to die. This is how Varda sets up, on film, the photos she once took of Gérard Philipe and Jean ...”

“... below the palace grounds.‘The city I am talking about (Tokyo) offers this precious paradox,’ Roland Barthes wrote in 1970.It does possess a centre, but this centre is empty. The entire city turns around a site both forbidden and indifferent … One of the two most powerful cities of modernity is thereby built around an opaque ring of ...”

“... than an academic at work’. Yet Tristes Tropiques produced that ‘effect of the real’ which Roland Barthes saw as central to the power of the realist novel. The artist manqué had no lack of imagination. Before it became a memoir, Tristes Tropiques was the title of a ‘vaguely Conradian’ novel that Lévi-Strauss began writing when he returned to ...”

“... a motion forwards, as though to say: ‘Yes, that dress … and whatever it might yet lead to.’Roland Barthes suggested that grief is not so much a crushing oppression as ‘a painful availability: I am vigilant, expectant, awaiting the onset of a “sense of life”.’ This is the final non-resting place of Hardy’s lyricism, and a line from a ...”

“... in the light of recent political experience as other substantial works of the period, such as Roland Barthes’s Sade, Fourier, Loyola (1971) and Julia Kristeva’s La Révolution du Langage Poétique (1974). The juxtaposition may appear obvious with regard to Kristeva’s work, which involves a reading of Mallarmé in most respects complementary to ...”

“... its demographic ‘extinction’ by non-white ‘replacement’ (Renaud Camus, a disciple of Roland Barthes, in 2011), the ‘suicidal’ tendency of French people to marry foreigners (Éric Zemmour in 2014) and a growing sense that the ‘French’ are a ‘minority in their own country’ (Alain Finkielkraut in 2013).Suspicion of Muslims and their ...”

“... valedictory tributes to pantheon figures like Elias Canetti, Walter Benjamin, Antonin Artaud and Roland Barthes. This is when she began to overuse the word ‘exemplary’ and when elegy became her prevailing song. A more intimate tone marked the personal eulogy to the social theorist and activist Paul Goodman, which sounded as if it was coming from a ...”

“... past would be Dante’s Vita Nuova, with its rigour of self-examination, and in more recent times, Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, which does not flinch either at the constant companionship of pain. The author whispers to her friend Jim dying in a hospital bed: ‘You are surrounded by friends who love you.’ To which Jim pulls the sheet over ...”