In the field of contemporary literary studies, Roland Barthes (1915-1980) remains an influential figure. Yet the tendency in America to over-simplify his works as structuralist has prevented a thorough understanding of Barthes's unfolding as a critic and author. Patrizia Lombardo rejects an absolutist or developmental assessment of his career. Insisting that his works can best be understood in terms of the paradoxes he perceived in the very activity of writing, Lombardo similarly sees in Barthes the crucial ambiguity that determines the modern writer - an irresistible attraction for something new, different, breaking with the past, yet also an unavoidable scorn for the contemporary world.

Revolution must of necessity borrow, from what it wants to destroy, the very image of what it wants to possess.—Roland Barthes In the field of contemporary literary studies, Roland Barthes remains an inestimably influential figure—perhaps more influential in America than in his native France. The Three Paradoxes of Roland Barthes proposes a new method of viewing Barthes’s critical enterprise. Patrizia Lombardo, who studied with Barthes, rejects an absolutist or developmental assessment of his career. Insisting that his world can best be understood in terms of the paradoxes he perceived in the very activity of writing, Lombardo similarly sees in Barthes the crucial ambiguity that determines the modern writer—an irresistible attraction for something new, different, breaking with the past, yet also an unavoidable scorn for the contemporary world. Lombardo demonstrates that her mentor’s critical endeavor was not a linear progression of thought but was, as Barthes described his work, a romance, a “dance with a pen.”

Roland Barthes's consideration of the drawings of New York artist Saul Steinberg - originally an artist book posthumously published in France in 1983 - is historically important as one of the last remaining books in Barthes's oeuvre to be translated into English. all except you continues Barthes's inquiries into image-text relations, specifically the indiscernible horizon where writing meets drawing, one becoming the other. In his attempt to blur these registers, he produces less a critique than a translation, an attempt to merge author and artist, to see himself and his desire in the work of Steinberg, using the resources of structural linguistics and psychoanalysis. The impertinence of his critique mimics the deformations of Steinberg's drawings that are "sassy, deformed by the look on high, stretched, excessively crunched." We become suspicious that Barthes is writing more into Steinberg than Steinberg holds, or even that Steinberg is an alibi for some other aim that is withheld. Joe Milutis's translation takes the opportunity of a running commentary, in the form of translator's notes, to amplify Barthes's impertinent reading and authorial one-upmanship by speculating on the presumed failures and detoured transferences of the text. Since Barthes is less concerned with writing about art than writing through it, Milutis's "double session" perhaps provides the most faithful translation of the Barthesian eros in his write-through of the write-through. Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was one of the most influential writers and theoreticians of the 20th century, expanding our notions of what constitutes a literary text and writing itself. He is the author of Mythologies, Writing Degree Zero, The Pleasure of the Text, and Camera Lucida. Joe Milutis is a writer, media artist, and Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts and the MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics at the University of Washington-Bothell. He is the author of Failure: A Writer's Life (Zer0 Books, 2013) and Ether: The Nothing That Connects Everything (Minnesota, 2006).

In this book, first published in 1989, Mary Bittner Wiseman interprets Roland Barthes’s experiments as efforts to reposition the human subject with respect to language and to time in order to let the subject escape from the language of a particular culture and the present time. With her insistent pushing against the boundaries of our standard academic assumptions, Mary Bittner Wiseman succeeds in interpreting Barthes’s effort to join the traditional and the new. This title will be of interest to students of literature and philosophy.

First published in 1977, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes is the great literary theorist's most original work—a brilliant and playful text, gracefully combining the personal and the theoretical to reveal Roland Barthes's tastes, his childhood, his education, his passions and regrets.