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“... had the advantage of Robbe-Grillet’s own theoretical comments, and the invaluable support of Roland Barthes and other influential voices. The English avant-garde novel was, at least until quite recently, a bit short on theory, though Christine Brooke-Rose has done what she could to put that right. What tends to be ignored is the degree to which ...”

“... this embalming could also infuse his images with a psychic charge, an unexpected punctum, as Roland Barthes might say. Think of the two housewives in Tunafish Disaster (1963), victims of botulism taken directly from a newspaper page; smeared across the silkscreened painting, their smiling faces become piercing in repetition.From the early days of ...”

“... Even more than Diana, Marie-Antoinette was her frocks. They defined her and betrayed her. Madame Roland reported that when Marie-Antoinette tried to eavesdrop on a conversation between Pétion and the King, Pétion detected her presence by ‘the rustle of silk’. ‘It is she who invented the modern princess,’ says Chantal Thomas. She was the ...”

“... happened. Shortly after this larceny, I actually wrote a paper of my own. It was for a seminar on Roland Barthes and Oscar Wilde. That professor (Bob Scholes) suggested I try to publish the thing. So I submitted it to Genders, which secured two supposedly anonymous readers. One, though, was D.A. Miller (possibly Catholic). And the other was Eve. The ...”

“... to fiction. Pearson therefore doesn’t go all the way to the vanished or abolished author of Roland Barthes and the New Critics, but he gets well away from the single authorial meaning for a text. There is a single author, but this author wants us to differ – from him and from each other. The Happy Few, so often called upon by Stendhal, are not an ...”

“... poetry, in spite of superb lines and phrases, goes two-dimensional and dead. But it would tax a Roland Barthes to do justice to the inner life of ‘St Agnes Eve’, as of the Odes, and all their supremely felicitous incongruity. And it is essentially Shakespearean. Here again Keats misunderstood himself. He imagined he could only be Shakespearean by ...”

“... present low critical repute of naturalism really stems from its being too indulgent to society, as Roland Barthes maintained, or from its being (as observation suggests) less than indulgent to art. At any rate, it is in the anti-professional underground that Lurie has enlisted, by claiming the freedom to continue working with plots in which artists and ...”

“... believes for one moment, because Borges is anti-author, as anti-author in his whimsical way as Roland Barthes in his more hectoring one. Borges never mistook literature for life. Literature is better for us than life because it is more interesting, and more interesting because it has been planned, whereas life is so dishearteningly ...”

“... thick volume read with the ease of a novel. Again, the range is imposing – Raymond Queneau, Roland Barthes, E.M. Cioran, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Bruno Bettelheim, Peter Gay’s Art and Act, The New Oxford Book of Christian Verse – the casual erudition much in evidence. Updike is a master at summing up careers: from the letters of ...”

“... more urgently to be filled’. Warming up for a grand performance on Mallarmé, in the manner of Roland Barthes on Sarrasine, Klein conducts a close reading of Laforgue’s poem, ‘La cigarette’. It is good fun but there is too much virtuosity here for a troubled English palate. Inadvertently – although in French Studies one is never sure – Klein ...”

“... to present the matter as it is ... at its heart lies the principle, in the famous formula of Roland Barthes, that history is turned into nature.’ The deployment of myth as reality, of history as nature, is the cunning work of government as a mental art – and without successful deployment of myth, all police are useless. People behave as they are ...”

“... innovation’ and underplays its irrational character, admirably summarised at the time by Roland Barthes, who derided its claim to a ‘mythological truth’ and its tendency to see ‘culture as a disease’. Poujade appealed to petit bourgeois common sense rather than the expertise of the nation’s elites. ‘France,’ he said, ‘suffers ...”

“... literary arena long before they make their collective appearance on the political stage. Rather as Roland Barthes once speculated that one could write a history of textuality, showing how the self-conscious play of the signifier threads its way through the history of writing, so Auerbach charts the surfacing and submerging of popular realism from Homer to ...”

“... trace souvenir of the old culture, a token at a remove, a ‘mythical sign’ (in the parlance of Roland Barthes): hence the allusion to the floating world in the Hermès store in Tokyo, the village huts in the cultural centre in New Caledonia and so on. Beck calls this phenomenon ‘banal cosmopolitanism’, and, like Rogers and Foster, Piano is adept ...”

“... wife, in a photograph Begley reproduces twice in his book because he finds it so moving, and which Roland Barthes described as ‘one of the loveliest photographs in the world’. Nadar also took a photograph of her 35 years earlier, shortly after they were married, in which she sits back, arms folded protectively, eyes fixed on the camera, sceptical and ...”