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Presidential Criticism

John Sutherland, 10 January 1991

Victorian Subjects 
by J. Hillis Miller.
Harvester, 330 pp., £30, December 1990, 0 7450 0820 8
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Tropes, Parables, Performatives: Essays on 20th-Century Literature 
by J. Hillis Miller.
Harvester, 266 pp., £30, December 1990, 0 7450 0836 4
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... the two genres principally concerned with presentations of self. Miller has little time for Roland Barthes, because for Barthes nouvelle critique cross-breeds with new, Post-Modernist forms of writing. Miller for ever renews his critical equipment in order to apply and reapply it to the same old revered ...

Honest Lies

Michael Wood: Jean Giono, 27 July 2023

Ennemonde 
by Jean Giono, translated by Bill Johnston.
Archipelago, 171 pp., £12.99, September 2021, 978 1 953861 12 2
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The Open Road 
by Jean Giono, translated by Paul Eprile.
NYRB, 212 pp., £13.99, October 2021, 978 1 68137 510 6
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A King Alone 
by Jean Giono, translated by Alyson Waters.
NYRB, 155 pp., £14.99, June 2021, 978 1 68137 309 6
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... still later converted to a release on grounds of illness. There was no pardon or retrial. Roland Barthes wrote one of his brilliant mythology columns about the case, suggesting that since Dominici didn’t understand either the language or the logic of the French educated classes, he was tried according to a metropolitan fantasy of ...

Sartre’s Absent Whippet

P.N. Furbank, 24 February 1994

The Psychology of Social Class 
by Michael Argyle.
Routledge, 305 pp., £13.99, December 1993, 0 415 07955 1
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... of thought’) which we may call the ‘self-excluder’. According to this figure, Sartre or Roland Barthes will heap obloquy on the ‘bourgeoisie’ while leaving quite unanswered the question of what ‘class’ they belong to themselves. The natural inference would be that they are members of the ‘proletariat’; but if so, what becomes of the ...

Diary

Ian Hamilton: New New Grub Street, 3 February 1983

... route for Garrick Street, or Paddington. To the novice bookman with only a Catherine Cookson and a Roland Barthes between him and the workhouse this was indeed a stirring image of literary success. Gissing would have loved it. Now and then, of course, one pondered the doubtful morality of these Friday expeditions. After all, these books were ...

Banality and Anxiety

Michael Mason, 19 March 1981

Thirty Seconds 
by Michael Arlen.
Farrar, Straus/Faber, 211 pp., £5.50, February 1981, 0 374 27576 9
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The Crystal Bucket 
by Clive James.
Cape, 238 pp., £6.95, February 1981, 0 224 01890 6
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The Message of Television 
by Roger Silverstone.
Heinemann, 248 pp., £14.50, March 1981, 0 435 82825 8
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... ancestral to the books under review (Roger Silverstone, for example, frequently acknowledges Roland Barthes on fashion). It is striking nonetheless that only one of them, Michael Arlen’s Thirty Seconds, shows an inclination to regret the fact that intellectual and artistic adventurousness is habitually thwarted in television. More precisely, his ...

Bitten by a Snake

Michael Wood: Waiting for Valéry, 21 May 2020

The Idea of Perfection: The Poetry and Prose of Paul Valéry 
translated by Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody.
Farrar, Straus, 352 pp., £32, April, 978 0 374 29848 7
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... to the 1890s, but of wondering how posterity could have lost sight of such amazing modernist work. Roland Barthes thought Valéry’s poetry had become an anachronism, and Peeters suggests that this ‘judgment … seems to correspond to that of the majority of contemporaries’. ‘This poetry,’ Barthes said in an ...

Hitchcocko-Hawksien

Christopher Prendergast, 5 June 1997

Projections 7 
edited by John Boorman and Walter Donohue.
Faber, 308 pp., £11.99, April 1997, 0 571 19033 2
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Cahiers du cinema. Vol. I: The Fifties. Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave 
edited by Jim Hillier.
Routledge, 312 pp., £65, September 1996, 0 415 15105 8
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Cahiers du cinema. Vol. II: The Sixties. New Wave, New Cinema, Re-evaluating Hollywood 
edited by Jim Hillier.
Routledge, 363 pp., £65, September 1996, 0 415 15106 6
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Cahiers du cinema. Vol. III: 1969-72. The Politics of Representation 
edited by Nick Browne.
Routledge, 352 pp., £65, September 1996, 0 415 02987 2
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... from Vivre sa vie to La Chinoise). It also provides the context for a fascinating glimpse of Roland Barthes (at the time Dorr’s co-editor on Théâtre populaire) plugging the semiotic machine into film studies in his 1963 interview, ‘Towards a Semiotics of Cinema’. Here the talk is all of langue and parole, denotation and connotation, syntagm ...

The Urge to Strangle

T.J. Clark: Matisse’s Cut-Outs, 5 June 2014

Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs 
Tate Modern, until 7 September 2014Show More
Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs 
MoMA, 25 October 2014 to 8 February 2015Show More
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... paper shapes rustle. And the word – the imagined sound – sent me back to a wonderful essay by Roland Barthes called ‘The Rustle of Language’, and especially to its last two sentences: I imagine myself today something like the ancient Greek as Hegel describes him: he interrogated, Hegel says, passionately, uninterruptedly, the rustle of ...

Bonded by the bottle

Michael Wood, 14 June 1990

Writers in Hollywood 
by Ian Hamilton.
Heinemann, 326 pp., £14.95, June 1990, 0 434 31332 7
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... medium, the nature of the product upon which acts of interpretation descend. This may sound like Roland Barthes, but the question is admirably formulated in a New Jersey court ruling of 1905, quoted by Hamilton: ‘a photograph which is not only a light-written picture of some object, but also an expression of an idea, a thought, a conception of the one ...

Right Stuff

Alexander Cockburn, 7 February 1991

An American Life 
by Ronald Reagan.
Hutchinson, 748 pp., £19.99, November 1990, 0 09 174507 1
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... impelled to add: ‘None of this argues that George Bush is a bad man. He is not.’ Years ago Roland Barthes wrote about the bourgeois propensity to think in essences, and nowhere is this more evident than in the way Americans think and write about their political leaders. It was not as if Lewis needed the after-thought about Bush’s ...

Flattery

Peter Burke, 16 September 1982

Le Roi-Machine: Spectacle et Politique au Temps de Louis XIV 
by Jean-Marie Apostolidès.
Les Editions de Minuit, 164 pp., £4.50
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Le Portrait du Roi 
by Louis Marin.
Les Editions de Minuit, 300 pp., £5.60
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... successors have gone to advertising agencies. The differences are apparent. However, as Roland Barthes has reminded us, epideictic rhetoric still flourishes in advertising, and Aristotle’s rules still apply. Hyperbole does not go out of date. Come to that, Versailles seems to be as appropriate a setting for the theatre of power in 1982 as it ...

Shakers

Denis Donoghue, 6 November 1986

Write on: Occasional Essays ’65-’85 
by David Lodge.
Secker, 211 pp., £12.95, September 1986, 0 436 25665 7
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... or difference (metaphor) and on the basis of perceived association or continuity (metonymy). Roland Barthes, in ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives’, thought it necessary to add a third type of discourse, which he called enthymematic, to account for intellectual discourse, but few critics have followed him in ...

Making the world

Christopher Prendergast, 16 March 1989

Gillette, or The Unknown Masterpiece 
by Honoré de Balzac, translated by Anthony Rudolf.
Menard Press, 64 pp., £5.95, December 1988, 0 903400 99 5
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... in an act of exchange (in this respect it resembles the structure of Sarrasine analysed by Roland Barthes). The secrets are in part trade secrets, and thus elements of an initiation story emphasising the theme of the new ‘autonomy’ of the artist (for Poussin, Frenhofer represents ‘art with its secrets, its passions, its reveries’). But the ...

How awful

Emily Witt: Claire Messud’s Spinster, 23 May 2013

The Woman Upstairs 
by Claire Messud.
Virago, 304 pp., £14.99, May 2013, 978 1 84408 731 0
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... about fragmentation and identity and the tropes of gender, whatever the fuck they are, and Roland Barthes and Judith Butler and Mieke Bal – I could do that, they taught us how to do it, that’s what art school seemed mostly to be for, but I couldn’t do it with a straight face … and that’s why I went to get my master’s in Education and ...

Unhoused

Terry Eagleton: Anonymity, 22 May 2008

Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature 
by John Mullan.
Faber, 374 pp., £17.99, January 2008, 978 0 571 19514 5
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... distancing style by which it masks itself. Language itself may be authorless; but style, as Roland Barthes claims in Writing Degree Zero, plunges straight to the visceral depths of the self. Another strain of Modernism turns back to subjectivity itself, as if by way of refuge. The self may be fitful and fragmentary, but there is something we can ...

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