The Afterlives of Roland Barthes - by Neil Badmington (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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 Quotes

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

Barthes-like Heidegger and Foucault-has had a prolific posthumous publishing career. Badmington (Cardiff Univ., UK) undertakes to situate this diverse posthumous work. With remarkable concision, he not only explicates this work but also contextualizes it within Barthes's better-known published work. For instance, Badmington's exploration of the Mourning Diary in essence shows one the genesis of Camera Lucida. It is precisely this careful critical balancing-of the exegesis of the new and the anchoring in the well known-that makes this study so valuable. Accomplished with Badmington's scholarly care, this critical balance serves ultimately not to provide "origin stories+? to texts that are now part of the theoretical-critical canon, but rather to open up the originary force of Barthes's thinking, to remove it from the danger of overfamiliarity. Badmington concludes his study with an intriguing consideration of Barthes and Hitchcock-a figure noted for his conspicuous absence in Barthes's work. A final, Barthesian note: Bloomsbury is to be commended for making a book that feels nice in one's hands. Summing Up: Recommended.
CHOICE

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

About the Author

Neil Badmington is Professor of English at Cardiff University, UK. His previous books include Hitchcock's Magic (2011) and Alien Chic: Posthumanism and the Other Within (2004) and he is the co-editor (with David Tucker) of The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory.