In his first book, French critic Roland Barthes defines the complex nature of writing, as well as the social, historical, political, and personal forces responsible for the formal changes in writing from the classical period to recent times. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Roland Barthes’s 1967 essay, "The Death of the Author," argues against the traditional practice of incorporating the intentions and biographical context of an author into textual interpretation because of the resultant limitations imposed on a text. Hailing "the birth of the reader," Barthes posits a new abstract notion of the reader as the conceptual space containing all the text’s possible meanings. The essay has become one of the most cited works in literary criticism and is a key text for any reader approaching reader response theory.

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.

""Barthes par Barthes is a genuinely post-modern autobiography, an innovation in the art of autobiography comparable in its theoretical implications for our understanding of autobiography to Sartre's "The Words."--Hayden White

Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was a major French writer, literary theorist and critic of French culture and society. His classic works include Mythologies and Camera Lucida. Criticism and Truth is a brilliant discussion of the language of literary criticism and a key work in the Barthes canon. It is a cultural, linguistic and intellectual challenge to those who believe in the clarity, flexibility and neutrality of language, couched in Barthes' own inimitable and provocative style.