MAN OF PARTS
Susie Tharu
Roland Barthes by Jonathan Culler Fontana Modern Masters Series, London, 1984, 128 pp., £1.75
Jan-Feb 1984, volume 8, No 4

If for the moment we eschew the larger questions, Jonathan Culler’s critical biography of Barthes ought to be exemplary. Culler moves through the awk¬ward restrictions on style and length imposed by the Modern Masters Series with an ease all the more remarkable given a subject as mobile, contempo¬raneous, still warm as it were, from the fires of several con¬troversies as Roland Barthes. Piquant summaries of the major projects provide a clearly signposted route for a quick journey through Barthesian country. There are the expect¬ed stops: Mythologies, S/Z, Critical Essays and The Plea¬sure of the Text, as well as views that are not so well-known: the preface to Brillat-Savarin’s La Physiologie du Gout; Barthes on ‘Daring to be Lazy’. And just in case even that is not the reader’s twenty-five rupees worth, we have the Culler specials: Bar¬thes’s aversion to poetry, a scathing analysis of the ‘mys¬tique’ of the corporeal and, for theatre lovers, a more systema¬tically documented collection of Barthes on Brecht than I have yet seen.

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