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“... In the process Paglen also suggests a model of photography that turns the influential account of Roland Barthes on its head: rather than the inadvertent detail that charges the image almost accidentally (which Barthes called the punctum), Paglen photographs intentional objects that are almost hidden from view – in ...”

“... is mocking himself without any assistance. The phrases are forms not of wisdom but of what Roland Barthes called doxa, the utterance of what the world thinks, or what we think it ought to think. Balzac, as Barthes suggests, is a master of this language, and what for the narrator is a tale of snooping in a ...”

“... In his 1957 classic of demystification, Mythologies, Roland Barthes found a new argument with which to reopen the troublesome case of Gaston Dominici. Dominici was a septuagenarian Provençal farmer who in 1954 was tried for the murder of three members of an English family who had been camping close to his land ...”

“... and instant high-tech is above all reassuring, just as it must have been reassuring to hear from Roland Barthes that ‘literature is what gets taught’ – i.e. is what I am teaching you. A representative high-tech man tells us that literary criticism ‘has come a long way’ since the days of the man of letters, which is reassuring in the sense that ...”

“... nature, of course, only has being in language. He draws richly from such literary critics as Roland Barthes and Peter Brooks, but he is a member of that rare emerging species, the male feminist, and above all, he invokes Monique Wittig and Julia Kristeva, and heats the whole by the halogen sparkle of the superanovae of the American cultural empyrean ...”

“... and for an epitaph on it he directs us to Balzac’s story ‘Sarrasine’ (familiar to us from Roland Barthes’ S/Z). According to Crow, the story both draws heavily on Girodet’s life-history and is an allegory of two of his paintings, the Endymion and the Galatea, and Balzac is using castration (the mysterious central figure in the story is a ...”

“... spirit in its sweeping totalities, rigorous taxonomies and refusal to evaluate. ‘System,’ Roland Barthes once remarked, ‘is the declared enemy of Man.’ He intended the remark as a criticism of Man, not System. The human, he meant, is thought to be irreducible to the structures which set it in place. Structuralism launched a scandalous assault ...”

“... is a lot of history here, although it won’t lie still, as history is sometimes supposed to (Roland Barthes: ‘Is History not simply that time when we were not born?’), and it may have an element of fiction in it. ‘We launched our marriage in guilt,’ Diana says. ‘Everyone had to be listened to, apologised to, thanked for giving us ...”

“... to have entered on his professional life in the mid-1960s when Sartre was ceding the territory to Roland Barthes; when, as John put it, ‘the first rustlings of Literary Theory’ – he gave it capital letters – ‘were to be heard’, and the quarrel between those who took to theory and those who took against it was just starting up. John had no ...”

“... for literary critics than the traditional labour of elucidating literary works? Why are names like Barthes, Derrida, Benjamin, Foucault, Lukacs, Kristeva, Althusser, Lacan, Habermas, Bloom, Jameson, invested with the kind of glamour that literary intellectuals used to accord only to the great imaginative writers of their own time? Why have these masters ...”

“... chemistry, physics, engineering (and credit cards). Visiting a plastics exhibition in the 1950s, Roland Barthes had been struck by its double role: ‘the quick-change artistry of plastic is absolute: it can become buckets as well as jewels ... It is the first magical substance which consents to be prosaic.’ Although, ‘in the hierarchy of the major ...”

“... the power to exclude each other, in the way molecular biology, for example, excluded vitalism. Barthes, writing of strands in French literary criticism, says that ‘Since these different ideological principles can exist simultaneously (and for my part, I can, in a certain sense, accept both simultaneously), we have to conclude that the ideological choice ...”

“... Bloch, ‘but if he is treated badly, I immediately find he doesn’t deserve it.’ Thinking of Roland Barthes’s defence of jargon (between jargon and platitude, always choose jargon), she sees Bloch’s pompous and allusive language as the weapon of the outsider against the condescension of the clan, and thinks that if he had lived a little later he ...”

“... the despair, the sense of her own uniqueness, are all commonplaces of the addict experience. Roland Barthes imagined the paranoiac as someone who would ‘produce complicated texts, stories developed like arguments, constructions posited like games, like secret complaints’. This is what Kavan bequeathed – a living tissue, of lies, of truths, of ...”

“... fits this description, from the Russian Formalists to the poststructuralists. Roman Jakobson, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, J. Hillis Miller, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida: all of them are admirably close readers. Marxist critics like Jameson are among the more notable targets of this bit of intellectual indolence, which is the reason he once ...”