Roland Barthes: A Beginner’s Guide (review)

Among the cultural icons that have marked the continental structuralist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Roland Barthes is certainly the one who has best resisted the winds of intellectual change. While no one today regularly refers to A.J. Greimas, T. Todorov, or even J. Kristeva in matters of cultural or literary [End Page 152] studies, the work of Barthes is still commented, seminars are still devoted to his work and, in Paris, the Beaubourg Cultural Center recently organized a six-month long exhibit devoted to his life, his times and his work. This sustained celebrity is the reason why Mireille Ribière, a well-known specialist of Georges Perec, proposes this extremely useful “introduction” to the main aspects of Barthes’s legacy, in a collection usually reserved for indisputable “great” thinkers of our contemporaneity (Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, etc.). To devote a book to a coherent and comprehensive presentation of Barthes for an English-speaking audience appears especially timely to Ribière because, for her, his intellectual production is one of the most useful of the “pensée-68” movement that was so influential then, and whose heritage is still pervasive in many authoritative intellectual works of today’s Anglo-Saxon critical production. Thus, she writes:

In the current [world of humanistic studies], Barthes’s work continues to provide seminal references. Given his keen awareness of history, his interest in the way we are manipulated by cultural forms, as well as his overriding concern with meaning and the way we make sense of the world, this is hardly surprising.

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