The most recent issue of Cultural Politics (volume 11 and issue 3) features an interview with cultural theorist Roland Barthes that has never before been published in English. Barthes’ 1972 interview with Japanese academic Shigehiko Hasumi includes discussions of Le Plaisir du texte (1973), and of a restlessness that kept Barthes moving from one critical language to another, “as soon as meanings have solidified and acquired the status of stereotype,” translator Chris Turner writes.
Read the full interview with Roland Barthes, made freely available.
For further scholarship on Barthes, read “In Saecula Saeculorum: On How Stories End,” by Christian Thorne in “Inevitability,” a special issue of Modern Language Quarterly (volume 76 and issue 2). The article examines Barthes’s S/Z (1970), which was published after his initial trips to Japan and before he participated in the interview with Shigehiko Hasumi.
2 comments