Reflections on a Manual

Abstract

“Reflections on a Manual” was Roland Barthes's contribution to the colloquium “The Teaching of Literature” held at Cerisy-la-Salle in 1969. Organized by Tzvetan Todorov and Serge Doubrovsky, the Cerisy gathering featured other prominent theorists, like Gérard Genette and A. J. Greimas, whose concerns Barthes addresses and adapts to his own purposes in this paper. Reading manuals of the history of French literature as texts whose grammar is organized by a set of oppositions, he conducts a structuralist enterprise that becomes an inquiry into the myths enabling societies to create and preserve their identities. Barthes's reflections on the teaching of literature recall some of the major works that punctuate the phases of his career, from Mythologies (1957) to “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative” (1966) to The Pleasure of the Text (1973).