“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Garbo studies has acquired all the trappings of a negative theology. Garbo’s face is an idea, Roland Barthes declared in 1957, not an event: it projects an essential rather than an existential beauty. The ‘divine’ Garbo descended, Barthes wrote, ‘from a heaven where all things are formed and perfected in the ...”

“... writing was ‘a tissue of quotations’, and that the writer’s ‘only power is to mix’, as Roland Barthes taught, when DJ Shadow was riding high. Techno’s imagery fitted well with the traces and fields that post-structuralism traded in, and the rave scene’s communal, anti-starry ethos could with a bit of imaginative effort be seen as another ...”

“... innovation in the English criticism of Verne, he is much indebted to such Parisian predecessors as Roland Barthes, Michel Butor and Michel Serres. Moreover, The Mask of the Prophet is a sequel to Martin’s earlier book, The Knowledge of Ignorance: From Genesis to Jules Verne (1985), so there is a certain amount of self-repetition. Martin sets out both to ...”

“... of precipitous foreshortening is manifest above all in the extinctions which spatter his reign. As Roland Barthes pointed out, deaths don’t just accumulate in Tacitus’ narrative of Nero’s reign, they seem to multiply and proliferate, as if racing to some kind of baroque finale. The typical murder attempted by this thespian prince is the staged ...”

“... excites our desire to know more. His handling of this desire, what’s more, might have pleased Roland Barthes, for the novel’s construction candidly runs the reader’s curious pleasure in a story up against the extended pleasure of controlled foreplay. Ptoly recounts the story of Xanthippe to his 16-year-old niece-mistress Jo-Jo over gourmet meals ...”

“... this strange and eloquent book, as Augustine himself hoped. But it can’t be, by definition, what Roland Barthes called a readerly text, a conventionally familiar one, even in Constantine’s compelling and fluent new translation: it is a book that wants to be more accessible and hospitable than it could possibly be because the writing of the book is ...”

“... but also tells the life – is interested in what a life might be; it quotes Mel Brooks and Roland Barthes (in that order). McCann’s interest in the layering of identity is not new for him. In his book on Marilyn Monroe (1988) he writes: ‘Monroe was a professional role-player, she assumed a multiplicity of selves, of “Marilyns”, making it ...”

“... Marxist, and so was distant from such diverse critics of everyday culture as Raymond Williams and Roland Barthes. Banham once described his prose as ‘flip, throw-away, smarty-pants, look-at-me’, which might seem to ally it with the New Journalism of a Tom Wolfe. But Wolfe is a reactionary, and his nasty swipe at modern architecture, From Bauhaus to ...”

“... to tread, and specialised in finding the profound in the superficial. Thirty years later, Barthes compared Citroëns to cathedrals and identified the mythical appeal of washing powder. But Kracauer dived into the shallows first.Benjamin praised him as a fellow ragpicker, sorting through cultural trash for meaning. In writing about our bewitchment by ...”

“... to overthrow the destructive construction of gender in Western society, such as Monique Wittig and Roland Barthes,’ Ramadan writes, ‘Garréta set about subverting the way gender works in the French language in order to combat its sexist nature.’ This doesn’t seem quite right, since subverting something normally means more than avoiding its ...”

“... profoundly). Certainly Foucault saw Warhol’s silkscreens as simulacra, as did Gilles Deleuze, Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard, and some of us approached a good deal of postmodernist art in this way too.How does the play with simulacra relate to the left politics that Magritte supported? ‘In life as in my painting, I am also traditionalist, even ...”

“... didn’t exist has only increased his fascination in the Post-Modern era. It’s some time since Roland Barthes announced the death of the author, insisting that all texts should be seen merely as a ‘multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash’. No texts could illustrate this idea of literature more ...”