“... sporadic, whereas for Postmodernism it is impossible to open your mouth without quoting. As Roland Barthes and others have pointed out, the phrase ‘I love you’ is always a citation, indeed one of the most shopsoiled citations of all, even when it is sincerely meant. For the romantically inclined, this opens up an ominous gap between experience ...”

“... want to make their characters more distinctive. Flaubert is the usual example, as he was for Roland Barthes in ‘The Reality Effect’. Barthes explains the function of the ‘useless detail’ in Flaubert: we don’t need to know that a barometer sat on the piano in Mme Aubain’s room, but the particularity ...”

“... Shine is all too credible. The reality of Helfgott naturalises the myth of ‘Helfgott’. (Roland Barthes might have called the man an ‘alibi’.) Only now that Helfgott and Shine are circulating co-extensively, ‘Helfgott’ is naturalising the mythic readings of Helfgott which the film itself established – such is the logic of the culture ...”

“... the respective plot structures. Margaret Atwood chooses for both the chronological device which Roland Barthes once referred to as the ‘zig-zag’ or ‘saw-toothed’ structure. We move alternately between two levels of narrative, the first being the life of the central character up to the commencement of the action, and the second being the ...”

“... of the écrivain and the intellectuel through a contrast best reflected in the ambiguous status of Roland Barthes. The redefinition goes beyond the advent of the sciences humaines within academe: among intellectuals, even the philosopher became less of an écrivain – Althusser entered literature only posthumously, with his autobiography. Foucault, and ...”

“... suburbs in its passion for order and symmetry, but offends them in its inhuman criticism. System, Roland Barthes remarked, is the enemy of Man. Anti-rationalism is alarming, not least when it takes to the streets of the Latin Quarter; but in the end it is disruption and subversion that it cherishes, not systematic thought and social ...”

“... as an institution. He was, and remains, an author who in many respects resists analysis. Roland Barthes dubbed him ‘the last happy writer’, and certainly he has little of the angst which we have come to expect of modern writers. ‘Of all men living the one he knows the least is himself,’ was his doctor’s comment. Obsessive, driven, yet ...”

“... there is no common ground, no sameness.’ Come on, give us a hard one – that’s too easy! Roland Barthes has already shown us how to analyse the ‘mythologies’ of wrestling and women’s magazines; the WordPerfect manual is intertextually related to the seamless text of discourse in various modes which is the Derridean universe. Of course a ...”

“... photographs she snapped in her last moments. Hall, like every art school graduate who’s read Roland Barthes, will know that the photograph is always linked to death. In her deposition to the INS, my sister talked of top surfers’ predilection for having themselves photographed from sea level in close-up so that they can both experience the intimacy ...”

“... At night,’ Roland Barthes once wrote, ‘the adjectives come back.’ It’s an eerie and sobering thought for writers who have been trying to clean up their act during the day, but for Lawrence Durrell as for Conrad adjectives don’t come back because they never left. If there is a mystery in Conrad it’s inscrutable, if there’s a tangle in Durrell it’s inextricable ...”

“... not the way the reader finds or interprets them. In this perspective the author is not dead as Roland Barthes thought he or she had to be if the reader was to be liberated (‘The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author’), but dismissed, let’s say, sent off for a walk while the unimpeded reader looks around among the ...”

“... in another version of the tale, she also had books by Blanchot and Céline. She studied with Roland Barthes, introduced the work of Mikhail Bakhtin to the French, and became closely associated with the magazine Tel Quel. She met Philippe Sollers within months of her arrival and they were married in 1967. After two books on semiotics (1969-70), she ...”

“... Magazine in a Box’ with work by Andy Warhol, John Cage, John Lennon and Roland Barthes. There’s no shortage of big names mixed in with the obscure stuff – but they’re often not doing what you might expect. As well as Slonimsky’s hymn to Castoria, there are Samuel Beckett’s radio plays, Richard Serra’s video ...”

“... masters of 17th-century French prose, but theologians before they were writers. The more impartial Roland Barthes characterised de Gaulle’s prose as ‘frantically anachronistic’, ‘the style of a pastiche writer’. The memoirs are even more pompous in English translation. This is not to fault the 1950s translators: Jonathan Griffin for the first ...”

“... attributed it to Nabokov, I would be subscribing to the approach to literature and art advanced by Roland Barthes.’ White’s journalistic style is frequently lustreless, in striking contrast to the gloss of his fictional prose: ‘In another passage the harsh power of clichés is invoked.’ He can be pedagogical while being platitudinous: Christina ...”