The Afterlives of Roland Barthes
Author(s): Neil Badmington
Roland Barthes – the author of such enduringly influential works as Mythologies and Camera Lucida - was one of the most important cultural critics of the post-war era. Since his death in 1980, new writings have continued to be discovered and published. The Afterlives of Roland Barthes is the first book to revisit and reassess Barthes' thought in light of these posthumously published writings. Covering work such as Barthes' Mourning Diary, the notes for his projected Vita Nova and many writings yet to be translated into English, Neil Badmington reveals a very different Barthes of today than the figure familiar from the writings published in his lifetime.
Review(s):
“This book is an important contribution to scholarship on Barthes in English, and in addition to its detailed and original analyses there are many interesting asides in the footnotes … It is also a model of stylish and engaging academic prose.” - The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory
“An exploration of Roland Barthes’s posthumously published writings, Neil Badmington’s book offers an important contribution to Barthes Studies. Badmington’s text, both pedagogically accessible and convincingly argued, places import on Barthes’s posthumous literature, which includes Mourning Diary, Travels in China, and the unfinished Vita Nova, to reappraise the major texts published during the semiotician’s lifetime … The critical rigour, clarity, and accessibility of Badmington’s text would be appreciate by Barthesian scholars and university students working from the perspective of both French and Anglophone Studies. The wealth of accompanying end-of-chapter notes offers rich biographical details and bibliographic references, which further underscore this work’s dialogic contribution to Barthes Studies. Far from haunting, as Badmington reminds us, Barthes’s afterlives are very much kept alive in the interstitial pleasures and boredoms of his prose.” - Modern Language Review
ISBN: 9781350066991