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“... without being able to claim any centrality or superiority for their own discipline in the process. Roland Barthes, who died as professor of Literary Semiology at the Collège de France, likened the semiologist’s role in his inaugural lecture to that of a wild card in the university pack. Semiology is everywhere and nowhere: there can be a semiology of ...”

“... I imagine some similar jest might be devised for the laptop computer, but I can’t be bothered. Roland Barthes anguished over the problem of the literary division of labour before word processors arrived and solved it for the rest of us with equally uneasy social consciences. In an interview for Le Monde, he was asked the everlastingly interesting ...”

“... Towards the end of his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Roland Barthes observed that ‘the myth of the great French writer, the sacred depository of all higher values, has crumbled since the Liberation.’ In Ireland lately there has developed a liberating impulse to desacralise a national institution called YEATS and in a seminal pamphlet, ‘Heroic Styles: The Tradition of an Idea’, the country’s most significant and influential critic, Seamus Deane, has criticised the way in which an acceptance of ‘the mystique of Irish-ness’ can involve readers in the ‘spiritual heroics’ of a Yeats or a Pearse ...”

“... is fluid and unstable, he is also a doughty apologist for cultural authority. It is as though Roland Barthes and Samuel Johnson were to inhabit the same body. There are times when the book makes rather too much of the former persona. Cleland is seen as multiple, protean, parodic, dissident, marginal and un-English, all qualities likely to win a warm ...”

“... of each plate comprises a vignette depicting the workshop in action. This ‘epic of substance’, Barthes writes in his essay on the plates, offers us for the first time an ‘autonomous iconography of the object’, the transition from raw materials to finished commodity accomplished with no greater force than turning the page. For ...”

“... westernness of the West, the way the fringes in Mankiewicz’s film Julius Caesar, according to Roland Barthes, were the quick and surefire sign of Romanness. Everything is mythic in McCarthy, and at times he seems to smile at this himself. Not often.    What if they’re laid up somewhere fixin to drygulch us?    Drygulch ...”

“... this fact it’s hard to keep it out of our minds as we watch her. The film literally says what Roland Barthes says all still photographs say: this person is going to die. But even without this fact, as Lubitsch must have known, Lombard refutes his Nazi world whereas Benny only suspends it. Benny knows how to be ridiculous with style, but no one could ...”

“... The bits of the Russian language and the glum, liquid accents are signs of foreignness, as Roland Barthes once said the fringes in Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar were signs of Romanness. Well, they are signs of more than foreignness. They are signs of impenetrable darkness, of minds beyond our reach: Mueller-Stahl because we don’t know what he ...”

“... even likely, that such contributions may come. Many opponents of deconstruction would admit that Roland Barthes, whose death occurred the other day, was highly talented, and they could well have been moved by the praise accorded him in a Times obituary tribute (corrective of the main obituary, which was held to be insufficiently enthusiastic): ‘...”

“... from wires. Vriesendorp makes no environmental point with these works. She simply enjoys what Roland Barthes described as plastic’s ‘opaque, creamy and curdled’ quality. Barthes didn’t know what we now do about plastic’s afterlife, but he recognised, like Vriesendorp, its strangely fugitive nature: so ...”

“... Looking at The Human Condition, we alternate between believing and doubting the absent artist. Roland Barthes, in an essay called ‘Arcimboldo, or Magician and Rhetorician’,* decides that Arcimboldo uses Metaphor, Metonymy, Allegory, Allusion, Antanaclasis and Agnomination. I think he used, in the small, visual puns; and, in the ...”

“... is it so hard to conceive of a world without me, a world in which I never put in an appearance?’ Roland Barthes was pursuing a similar thought when he said we all know we are going to die but that to feel mortal is ‘not a natural feeling: the natural one is to believe yourself immortal; whence so many accidents due to carelessness’ – including, we ...”

“... of a silent movie. The photographs are superb. They show that Garbo was more than what the critic Roland Barthes called ‘a face-object’, belonging to that moment in cinema ‘when capturing the human face still plunged audiences into deepest ecstasy’. Yet the swift movements of her angular body were an equal part of her fascination, and ...”

“... other. Take the vaunted reality effect of photography, affirmed by theorists from André Bazin to Roland Barthes. Some of the artists in the show are not so sure. Richter remarks that photography is ‘a crutch to help me get to reality’, yet that he can approximate this goal only through painting; this leaves him with the paradoxical formulation, ‘I ...”

“... even diagrams and graphs. This may be the first book about fashion without pictures – even Roland Barthes used diagrams. Of course, Balzac’s ‘Physiologie de la toilette’ didn’t have any, but that originally appeared in a magazine, and journal publication can preclude pictures even now. Books on clothes are conventionally believed to ...”