Stafford, AJ (2015) Marking A Writer’s Centenary... Backwards. The Case of Roland Barthes, 1915-1980. Forum for Modern Language Studies, 51 (4). 480 - 494. ISSN 0015-8518
Abstract
This article considers the potential benefits of taking a ‘backwards’ approach to writing Roland Barthes's life. To write a person's life ‘forwards’ risks privileging, teleologically and deterministically, the end of their life and career over all those earlier stages that led (up) to the finality of mortality – to the point that the ‘end’ comes to explain, colour and over-determine the ‘rest’. What would it mean to read Barthes's life starting in the (final) 1977–1980 period and ‘ending’ with his orphaned childhood in interwar France? The aim is to show that a backwards biography can be fruitful, both for Barthesian study – showing the circular, spiral nature of his concerns, how they return in different places at different stages of his career – and for a more subjective, communal, even gregarious, relationship with History: a complexity of the past, and of otherness, that never reaches, but could approximate to, a ‘totality’.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press for the Court of the University of St Andrews. All rights reserved. This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in Forum for Modern Language Studies following peer review. The version of record Stafford, AJ (2015) Marking A Writer’s Centenary... Backwards. The Case of Roland Barthes, 1915-1980. Forum for Modern Language Studies, 51 (4). 480 - 494 is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqv051 |
Keywords: | Roland Barthes; biography; inverted direction; anti-teleology |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of Languages Cultures & Societies (Leeds) > French (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 09 Dec 2015 16:01 |
Last Modified: | 05 Oct 2017 20:44 |
Published Version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqv051 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Oxford University Press |
Identification Number: | 10.1093/fmls/cqv051 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:92638 |