Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
1,292
result(s) for
"Barthes, Roland"
Sort by:
Performance Degree Zero
Throughout his career, famed critical theorist Roland Barthes (1915-1980) had a complex and often uneasy relationship with theatre and performance. From his early theatre criticism, through his abrupt and enigmatic silence on theatre, to the theoretical 'stagings' of his thought in the 1970s, Barthes committed several stunning reversals with his opinions on theatrical performance.
InPerformance Degree Zero, Timothy Scheie argues that Barthes's body of work must be considered a lifelong engagement with theatre. Exploring his changing critical methodologies, Scheie provides a new understanding of the rapid shifts in critical modes Barthes traverses, from a Sartrean Marxism in the 1950s, through semiology, to French post-structuralism and the mournful introspection of his later years. The theatrical figure illuminates Barthes's accounts of the sign, the text, the body, homosexuality, love, the voice, photography, and other important and contested terms of his thought.
Performance Degree Zerooffers the first comprehensive account of Barthes's lifelong engagement with theatre and performance and fills a significant gap in Barthes criticism. It is essential reading for all Barthes scholars, theatre historians, and performance theorists.
eBook
Radical Indecision
In his newest book, Radical Indecision , esteemed
scholar Leslie Hill poses the following question: If the task of a
literary critic is to make decisions about the value of a literary
work or the values embodied in it, decisions in turn based on some
inherited or established values, what happens when that piece of
literature fails to subscribe to the established values? Put
another way, how should literary criticism respond to the paradox
that in order to make critical judgments of literary works, it is
first necessary to suspend judgment and to consider the
impossibility of making a final decision? Hill pursues these ideas
in the works of leading French critics Roland Barthes, Maurice
Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida, discussing writers such as Sade,
Mallarmé, Proust, Artaud, Genet, Celan, and Duras.
Hill concludes that, despite their differences, Barthes,
Blanchot, and Derrida share a conviction that criticism cannot take
place without exposure to that resistance to decision that is
inseparable from reading and that they address diversely as the
\"neuter\" or the \"undecidable.\" Radical Indecision offers
the first sustained exploration of the \"undecidable.\" This
comprehensive book breathes new life into the discipline of
literary theory and will be essential reading for students and
scholars alike.
eBook
Roland Barthes Writing the Political
Roland Barthes Writing the Political: History, Dialectics, Self re-reads and re-purposes for the twenty-first century France's most important writer of the twentieth century. It argues that Barthes's wide-ranging analyses - from Voltaire to Nietzsche, Marx to myth, gay love to Japan - can be applied to debates and controversies in the contemporary world, in what he called the writer's 'double grasp'.
eBook
A Semiotic Analysis of Chan Aesthetics in Chinese Animation: Reconstruction, Naturalisation, and Cultural Resonance
In recent years, Chinese animation has increasingly embraced traditional cultural elements, with Chan (Zen) Buddhism emerging as a rich source of philosophical and aesthetic inspiration. Existing research on the manifestation of Chan aesthetics in Chinese animation has explored the topic from diverse perspectives, yet analyses from a systematic semiotic perspective remain limited. Most symbolic studies reduce Chan elements to isolated visual signs with one-to-one meaning correspondences, neglecting the synergistic operation of narrative, visual, and auditory symbols in animation as an integrated system. Drawing on Roland Barthes’ theory of myth, this study employs a qualitative semiotic analysis to examine how Chan aesthetics are reconstructed and naturalised in Chinese animated works across different periods and genres. The analysis demonstrates that core Chan concepts are reconfigured into secularised audiovisual symbol systems. These systems translate abstract philosophy into tangible aesthetic forms and narrative structures, with meaning generated through the interplay of denotation, connotation, and myth. Furthermore, the representation of Chan aesthetics evolves across eras. Early animation relies on minimalist ink-wash visuals and implicit narrative; contemporary commercial animated film employs causal storytelling to embed Chan values in modern contexts; and Ye Youtian ‘poetic animation’ emphasises personal spiritual expression through non-linear imagery.
Journal Article
A Study of Some American Classic Westerns Based on Roland Barthes’s Theory of Semiotics
The main aim of this paper is to study a number of American key films from the 1960s and to relate them to the cultural and historical spirit of the age. In its critical approach, this paper depends mainly on Roland Barthes’ theories and concepts regarding the visual image and semiotics. The main films that will be studied include “Midnight Cowboy” (1969), directed by John Schlesinger; “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967), directed by Arthur Penn; and “The Wild Bunch” (1969), directed by Sam Peckinpah. The researchers argue that studying the content and various forms of these films in particular is significant because it reveals cultural and ideological messages about the 1960s. The present paper is also an attempt to shed light on Roland Barthes’ arguments about film theory. Despite the fact that the sum of his writings on film is relatively small, a closer scrutiny of these writings reveals that he has a vast influence on the field of film studies. His ideas on semiotics and structuralism are influential and can be extensively applied during film analysis.
Journal Article