“... 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 ...”

“... art of psychoanalytic listening parodies itself. It’s here that it makes many of its enemies. Roland Barthes wrote of psychoanalytic listening as ‘active’, as itself a form of ‘speaking’; he thought that it had modified our very notion of what listening can be. Certainly, the cast of mind Freud recommended to budding analysts a century ago ...”

“... the poet without history is an enigma or a dissident. The poet without history resists history, as Roland Barthes once said it was the business of literature in general to do. The literary work, he argued, is ‘at once the sign of a history and resistance to that history’.Poets with history discover themselves through discovering the world:They walk ...”

“... the passing years at the head of each page. The first date is 778, the year when the paladin Roland came very epically to grief against Saracen fundamentalists at Roncevaux, and the last is 1985, memorable for the 500th edition of French television’s authorial chat-show Apostrophes, whose anchorman, Bernard Pivot, like ...”

“... the whole enterprise of Les Lieux de mémoire was elegiac: the antithesis of everything that Roland Barthes, no less fascinated by icons, but more concerned with a critical theory of them, had offered in Mythologies (1957), deconstructing the emblems of francité – a coinage Nora at one point even borrows, divested of its spirit – with a ...”

“... And it is impossible not to admire the ingenuity of such major narratological practitioners as Roland Barthes and Gérard Genette. In Forster’s Aspects of the Novel the only other passage as famous as the one about flat and round characters is the one that distinguishes between story and plot. He makes it sound simple. Time and the narratologists ...”

“... as he told me, that he was very touched by the personal kindness shown to him at Argenteuil by Roland Leroy (who was then the chief Party spokesman on cultural and intellectual matters); and he was evidently impressed by Waldeck-Rochet’s conversation with him in which the Party leader expressed his fear that the intellectuals might desert the Communist ...”

“... by anyone who shares the type of objection to the 19th-century realist novel first raised by Roland Barthes’s observations about Balzac. Critics in this tradition find fault precisely with the techniques Burrows admires, strongly individualised characterisation and purportedly natural dialogue. They reject the idea that either characterisation or ...”

“... known as proof-correction. As its paratactic title suggests, this book aspires to the condition of Roland Barthes’s Image-Music-Text, if not of the children’s game Stone-Paper-Scissors, with which its circular inconsequentiality bears comparison. It belongs to that dismal genre of theoretical dressage in which a sequence of specious paradoxes is ...”

“... for example, the maker of a steamy Arabian Nights). Briggs lobbied hard for the job of translating Roland Barthes’s famous lecture series at the Collège de France, and, in spite of being a newcomer to ‘this little art’, was commissioned. Her engaging memoir unfolds in unnumbered, untitled, unstructured short chapters: a pillow book on the ...”

“... in so imposing a theological scheme. What the ‘Legion’ motif certainly does not connote is Roland Barthes’s use of the same Biblical quotation in his essay ‘From Work to Text’. Barthes used the reply of the man possessed by spirits – ‘My name is Legion, for we are many’ – to conjure up the ...”