Barthes Writes Research Articles

Living with illness

In this paper, I wish to discuss how people living with severe illness at home depict their lives either in a family setting or alone. Roland Barthes writes in Comment vivre ensemble (1977) about individual life lived in a variety of collective situations in different settings, and calls this idiorrhythmia. One of the settings Barthes studies is the sanatorium, where the figures of Autarky and Clôture, implying living together and living alone, are made relevant. I will use the concept of idiorrhythmia, to discuss ill people living at home either alone or together with relatives. The discussion is based on four contemporary Scandinavian novels: Lars Gustafsson’s The Death of a Beekeeper (1978), Ragnar Hovland’s A Winter’s Journey (2001), Gunnhild Corwin’s Ida’s Dance (2005) and Ellisiv Stifoss-Hanssen’s Let me sleep until this is just a dream (2014). These novels describe young and old adults suffering from cancer, staying at home and the challenges and strategies involved in living together or alone while experiencing severe illness.

Circling a subject: chasing happiness in creative practice

ABSTRACTThis paper will examine issues arising from the attempt to record and portray happiness in a narrative. Roland Barthes writes of the impossibility of writing definitively about this most subjective of emotions in The Pleasure of the Text, in which he asserts that a writer ‘can only circle such a subject’ (34). This paper will therefore examine some of the ways in which I circle around the subject in my own creative practice, and suggest some working definitions of ‘textual’ happiness that can inform the writing process. It will analyse different conceptions and depictions of happiness, including Pater’s present tense epiphanies; depictions of states of transcendent joy; happiness as a facet of the past tense; and how Barthes’ definition of the text of bliss might be embodied within a creative text. The paper will include several excerpts from my creative struggle with this emotion, and end with a demonstration of how happiness within a text often proves contradictory and unsettling.

PAN, GLAHN OG JAGTVIDENSKABEN FRA ÆSOP TIL C(H)ORA

This article asserts that the character of Thomas Glahn in Pan should be understood as a sport hunter. The popularity of sport hunting increased in Norway in the second part of the 19th century, causing a public discussion on the ethics of this kind of hunting compared to hunting for survival. The article hypothesizes that Hamsun knew J. B. Barth's writings about the value of hunting and experiencing nature. In his “Afhandling om den Fornøielse, Menneskene finde i jagten” (1865), published for a second time around 20 years later, Barth defines the ethos of sport hunting, and argues that young men from the bourgeoisie class can gain important values and education from hunting. The article shows how the character of Glahn can be read as an example of Barth's view of the ideal hunter. However, in one important aspect, Glahn does not live up to the expectations that the reader in Hamsun’s time might have had about the ideal hunter. Barth claims that engaging in ethical sport hunting also improves the hunter’s mental health. Glahn obviously does not confirm this claim. The unfulfilled expectations on this matter provoke questions within the reader about Glahn’s mental health and recalls Hamsun’s early interest in the human mind in a modern world.

Representing Entertainment(s) in Infinite Jest

Representing Entertainment(s) in Infinite Jest Philip Sayers (bio) The title of David Foster Wallace’s 1996 novel Infinite Jest refers, amongst other things, to several films of the same title directed by one of the novel’s characters, James O. Incandenza (also known as Himself and the Mad Stork), the last of which provides what Wallace refers to (using, not untypically, a term taken from the realm of cinema) as the novel’s “MacGuffin” (Lipsky 157). Incandenza’s final Infinite Jest, referred to throughout the novel and henceforth in this paper simply as “the Entertainment” (Infinite Jest 90) is, however, “not just a MacGuffin” (Lipsky 157). It is a film apparently so compelling, so entertaining, that anyone who catches as much as a glimpse of it becomes utterly entranced, unable to engage in any activity other than watching the film, over and over, until death. As such, it is also “kind of a metaphorical device” (Lipsky 157), through which Wallace explores the role of film and television in contemporary US culture. Wallace uses the term “entertainment” throughout the novel, and elsewhere in his writing (e.g., Supposedly Fun Thing 148), as a synonym for movies and television shows. This paper, then, explores first Wallace’s representation of entertainment in general, and second his representations of specific “entertainments.” In his short 1975 essay “Upon Leaving the Movie Theater,” Roland Barthes writes about the cinema in a manner strikingly reminiscent of the Entertainment in Infinite Jest. He compares the movie-going experience to hypnosis, and he describes the spectator as glued by the nose to the screen, “riveted to the representation” (3). Essay and novel are both concerned with the question of how to “loosen the glue’s grip” (3), and both present film as conducive [End Page 346] of sleep: Barthes writes of “spectators slip[ping] into their seat as they slip into a bed, coat and feet on the seat in front of them” (2). This description is echoed in the way Wallace describes the viewing habits of the Canadian/ Saudi medical attaché who becomes the Entertainment’s first victim. For him, watching a selection of entertainment cartridges is a method of relaxation after a long and stressful day of dealing with the maxillofacial yeast of the Saudi Minister of Home Entertainment: “at the day’s end, he needs unwinding in the very worst way” (Infinite Jest 34). “Worst,” here, presumably means most effective, but the choice of word implies that the attaché’s methods of relaxation are bad for him. Indeed they are. After Wallace explicitly compares entertainment with drugs and alcohol (“the medical attaché partakes of neither kif nor distilled spirits” [34]), the soon-to-be-victim settles down to watch the lethal Entertainment. His usual routine is to eat dinner “before the viewer in his special electronic recliner,” which, when his entertainments have had their soporific effect, tilts backwards so that he “is permitted to ease effortlessly from unwound spectation into a fully relaxed night’s sleep, still right there in the recumbent recliner” (34). The torpor-inducing effect of the Entertainment is far more potent than that of the attaché’s usual selection of cartridges, but, for Barthes and for Wallace, even normal entertainment (as opposed to the Entertainment) brings about sleep. Entertainment, for Wallace, lies on one side of a “continuum,” at the other side of which is art (Lipsky 80): whereas entertainment’s “chief job is to make you so riveted by it that you can’t tear your eyes away, so the advertisers can advertise” (Lipsky 79) and it “gives you a certain kind of pleasure that I would argue is fairly passive” (80), art “requires you to work” (174). Wallace portrays entertainment in terms that recall Barthes’s descriptions of his visits to the cinema, and Wallace’s own essay on David Lynch: “a commercial movie doesn’t try to wake people up but rather to make their sleep so comfortable and their dreams so pleasant that they will fork over money to experience it” (Supposedly Fun Thing 170). He also frequently compares it to candy—“Real pleasurable, but it dudn’t [sic] have any calories in it” (Lipsky 79)—in...

The Photograph as Mystery: Theological Language and Ethical Looking in Roland Barthes’sCamera Lucida

Throughout Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes appeals to Christian theological language to describe photography—what it is, how it works, and what happens when viewers look at photographs. He uses words like “revelation,” “resurrection,” “ritual,” “grace,” “acheiropoietos,” “transcendence,” and the “soul.” Photographs, Barthes writes, appeal to the “religious substance out of which I am molded.” They function as an “experiential order of proof,” “the proof-according-to-St.-Thomas-seekingto-touch-the-resurrected-Christ” (82). They are like “icons which are kissed in the Greek churches without being seen” (90). Ultimately, Barthes compares looking at photographs to a kind of private meditation practiced by believers in the Middle Ages, what he calls “under-thebreath prayer” (97). Barthes is not alone in his use of theological language to describe photography. Susan Sontag and John Berger, to list just two examples,

Re-Rereading Camera Lucida

... those who fail to re-read are obliged to read the same story everywhere. Roland Barthes, S/Z Artist and critic Victor Burgin uses the above quotation to open his essay Rereading Camera Lucida, critical examination of Roland Barthes's theoretical current throughout Camera Lucida: Reflections in Photography (1980), Image-Music-Text (1977), and Mythologies (1957). first time I read Camera Lucida I was on the train from Cusco to Machu Picchu, Peru, which travels alongside the Urubamba River in the Sacred Valley of the Incas in the Andes. At that moment, I was interested in photography's role in objectifying ruin and objectifying (a) people. In my rereading with Burgin, I found myself not only questioning my role but also reconsidering the phenomenology of my interpretation. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] As I watched others in the process, I lost all desire to capture any of the scenery around me. I'd had enough of the local women's persistent pressure: Foto, miss! Miss, foto. I did not want to pose with my family for cliche tourist photos, but it was impossible to disregard the occasion. As Barthes writes, did I care about the rules of composition of the photographic landscape, or, at the other end, about the Photograph as family rite? (1) like Barthes, I could not dismiss the intrinsic personal value of photography or retreat to simplistic sociological critique of tourist photography. Barthes says it best: Yet I persisted; another, louder voice urged me to dismiss such sociological commentary; looking at certain photographs, I wanted to be primitive, without culture. (2) At these words I paused. What did he mean by this? And was it appropriate? As I gazed out the train window, peasant children looked up from their work in the fields to wave as we passed them in floating flash. Barthes writes of subjective discomfort, being torn between two languages, one expressive, the other critical, and the effort to dismiss systematic reduction of his critical language to particular discourse such as semiology, sociology, or psychoanalysis. (3) This burden is obligatory to the artist, but what of the discomfort of the human being objectified as observed subject? observed might convey something through gesture or posture, but his fated objecthood inevitably undermines his critical capacity. object is never the Operator or the Spectator. To Barthes, the experience of being photographed involves sensation of inauthenticity, characterized as a subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience micro-version of death (of parenthesis): I am truly becoming specter. (4) By this account, the folk-dressed natives are corpses of their true beings while, to the tourist, they embody the original, unadulterated, and primitive. Their colorful dress, weathered skin, and dark hair beg objectification, but this palpability is beyond superficial. It is super-authentic. Their appearance is never for itself but for authenticity's sake. Dressed for admiration like dolls in cabinet, they become lifeless--or as Barthes suggests in consideration of photography's history, they become museum objects. (5) Their objectification by the tourist's photograph is, if not micro-death, an artfully subtle life-removal. Burgin intentionally rereads Barthes intertextually to delineate the structural motifs throughout his texts. (6) Barthes's early structuralism unequivocally reveals the binary distinction (in photography and literature) of denotation and connotation--the literal and the symbolic meanings. In his essays The Photographic Message (1961) and Rhetoric of the Image (1964) Barthes demonstrates the distinct but operationally related roles of the signifier. Their relationship, he contends, is paradoxical insofar as the literal image exist on its own and thus cannot be substantial but only relational. …

Liebe im 20. Jahrhundert: Ruth Berlau/Bertolt Brecht und Dora Maar/Pablo Picasso

The essay sketches and analyzes the process of love between Ruth Berlau and Bertolt Brecht as well as between Dora Maar and Pablo Picasso. It is oriented by a theory of love, which Roland Barthes unfolded in his study “Fragments of a language of love”. The empirical analysis relies on “figures”, which, as Barthes writes, pop up in the heads of lovers, which coin the ”dis-cursus” of lovers and structure the course of “lovetales”, without a firm order or succession. Selected out of a multitude of figures, which are put into an alphabetical order by Barthes, are: “encounter”, “expectation”, “adorability”, “dependence” and “decline”.

The Word of Christ and the World of Culture: Sacred and Secular through the Theology of Karl Barth

theological revolution that Karl Barth inspired was by no means a dismissive reaction to modern culture but, rather, was a dynamic and carefully nuanced encounter with the concerns of his day. This excellent new work by Paul Lewis Metzger provides an exposition and extension of Barth's engagement of culture in view of his doctrine of the Word. Metzger demonstrates that Barth endeavored to relate Christ to culture in inseparable terms while maintaining a distinction between them. Working from an intimate knowledge of all of Barth's writings, Metzger shows how Barth's doctrine of the Word provides a sound basis on which to build a theological model of culture that guards against the two extremes of either the divinization or the secularization of culture, while at the same time nurturing a healthy appreciation for the secular domain. first part of the book analyzes Barth's formative theological period, which is characterized by his engagement with culture and what is termed Protestantism. second part of the book focuses on how Barth's answer -- a dialectical model of the Word -- enabled him to offer a constructive synthesis of Christ and culture. final section of the book traces the way Barth was able to frame culture within his theological model and yet continue to champion the secular domain. The Word of Christ and the World of Culture is a superb volume that will benefit anyone studying Barth, modern theology, or the relation of Christianity and culture.

Voices from the Depths: Reading "Love" in Luce Irigaray's Marine Lover

Yet, except for the case of the Hymn, which combines the dedication and the text itself, what follows the dedication (i.e., the work itself) has little relation to this dedication. The object I give is no longer tautological (I give you what I give you), it is interpretable; it has a meaning (meanings) greatly in excess of its address; though I write your name on my work, it is for them that it has been written (the others, the readers). Hence it is a fatality of writing that we cannot say of a text that it is but only, at best, that it has been created amorously, like a cake or an embroidered slipper. —Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments If, as Barthes writes, it is by a fatality of writing itself that a text cannot be amorous, then Luce Irigaray's Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche—written for, about, and with Nietzsche—can be read precisely as a revitalization of writing. Suppose we were to read Marine Lover not only as a critique, but as an encounter with Nietzsche: an amorous encounter, which serves to bring to life Nietzsche's dedication of his work to the philosophers of the future. In her interpretation of his work, Irigaray poses to Nietzsche the possibility that his of the might be a woman, even though his various stylizations of woman (as a trope for truth, dissimulation, shame, prudishness, seduction, and slavish dependency, among other things) seem to preclude actual women as readers of Nietzsche's work. Although he writes woman's name continually over his texts, women are not the ones to whom Nietzsche dedicates his work: the philosopher of the future to whom he beckons is presumed him to share certain prejudices—philosophers' prejudices—about women. What does this mean for his women readers? Feminism's encounter with Nietzsche has been interesting and productive, but never easy. A number of excellent accounts of Marine Lover have already been published that enumerate Irigaray's criticisms of Nietzsche, reading her elemental address to him in terms of his forgotten relation to certain women (his mother, his sister, and a postulated lover). 1 I would like to contribute a new dimension to this conversation, exploring the effects of the affective relation that Irigaray sets up between herself and Nietzsche in Marine Lover. In particular, I am interested in how her critique of Nietzsche's text quickens—or enlivens—his philosophy. Irigaray presents Marine Lover as an address directly to Nietzsche, writing from the perspective of the reader whom his philosophy

La Festa del Pane: Food, Devotion and Ethnic Identity, The Feast of San Francesco di Paola, Toronto

Every year, on the third Sunday of May, the Sicilian Salemi community in Toronto holds a religious festa in honor of San Francesco di Paola. On average, the celebration attracts five to six thousand people and includes a special Mass and panegyrics followed by a street procession of the saint's statue, a life size-figure draped in ribbons pinned with money as votive offerings. The statue is accompanied by a musical band, church and committee officials, society standard bearers, Third Order members, and other devotees. The event is a fairly typical Italian immigrant festa except for two central, unique features, both associated with food: i.e., the pietanze meal just prior to Mass, involving the ritual feeding of thirteen children in a tent enclosure adjacent to the church and the nearby display of a spectacular “chapel” or shrine (the cena) covered entirely in oranges, lemons and ornately shaped breads of every size.This paper examines this feast, and its food associations in particular, as a religious and ethnic evenet. Food, of course, is about more than taste and nutrition. It is also, as Roland Barthes writes, “a system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations, and behavior.” The preparation, display and distribution select foods in the San Francesco di Paola feast have symbolic importance as conduits of social, religious, and cultural meaning. The same is said about the Salernitan immigrants' sense of themselves as Catholics and as Sicilian- and Italian-Canadians in modern-day Tornoto. The annual, public reenactment of the festa, now approaching its thirtieth year, highlights the significance placed on the presentation of communal (regional, national, and religious) identity. This is manifest especially in the symbology and rituals surrounding the display and distribution of the feast's most striking features–the pietanze meal and the cena breads.

Diane Arbus

Abstract In its history, photography has sustained many great allegiances, but none is more compelling than its ties to theatre. ‘[It] is not by Painting that photography touches art, but by Theater,’ Roland Barthes writes. ‘The camera ohscura, in short, has generated at one and the same time perspective painting, photography and the diorama, which are all three acts of the stage.’1 To assert that photography is an art of the stage may not offer any revelation to those familiar and nineteenth-century studio photography, with its elaborate sets and scenarios. But Barthes' appraisal of the kinship between photography and theatre quickly moves beyond the historical to the philosophical. His conviction that ‘Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of tableau vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead’,2 suggests that photography, regardless of the nature of its ‘referent’, is an essentially theatrical device that metamorphoses its subjects, turning each sitter into a phantasmic fragment of the (now extinct) past. The clement of reincarnation that Barthes ascribes to the photograph (that is, of the dead coming to life in the image) gives form to his fundamental belief in the transtormativc power of the image: ‘Now, once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of “posing,” I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image.’3

John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor: The Pitfalls of Mythopoesis

John Barth's writings are epitomes of contemporary American fiction: they expose some of its key problems and they test representative strategies for solving them. Barth belongs to a new school of fabulators' whose inventiveness, whose unexpected fantasies and whose renewed love for old tales have dominated the fictional landscape of the past decade in America. But beyond mere inventiveness and wit, ostentatious glibness and stylistic idiosyncracies, Barth has a keen awareness of topicality-not in the derogatory sense-and offers in his novels of ideas (a sub-genre long despised) prototypical formulations of present day pathology. Thus Barth's early fiction takes off on a statement of contemporary nihilism and absurdity. It puts variations of existentialist thought concerning the possibility or impossibility of stringent self-definition to a test. His later works increasingly concentrate on the function of the imagination in the self-defining process. It is in these works that Barth explores the dangers inherent in a reapplication of mythical schemes to history and everyday life and in the practice of storifying human experience.

Last Thoughts of Karl Barth

At a first glance the title of this paper may seem presumpituous. For only God knows the last thoughts of anyone who has passed away. The title, however, should be understood in the more restricted sense of the last published thoughts of Karl Barth. We are greatly indebted to Eberhard Busch, Barth's faithful assistant during the last years of Barth's life, for having made available to us these last thoughts in a small volume, entitled Letzte Zeugnisse. According to the Editor they were intended for publication and had been produced after the last grave crisis in Barth's health in August 1968 and before his death on the 10th December of the same year. Hence they had been produced within the last few months of Barth's life, whereas the writings and talks of Barth collected in Fragments Grave and Gay had taken place during the years 1962 to 1967. Letzte Zeugnisse also includes a most helpful Epilogue by the Editor in which he explains the circumstances in which those last testimonies had come into existence and reflects on the latter. Eberhard Busch, described by Barth as ‘truly an ideal assistant!’, had contributed the essay ‘Der Weg der Theologie in Anfechtung und Hoffnung’ to ΠAPPHΣIA (pp. 50ff), the Festschrift edited by him together with the Professors Jürgen Fangmeier and Max Geiger on the occasion of Barth's eightieth birthday (10th May 1966), and had also compiled the Bibliography in that volume (pp. 709–23), comprising Barth's writings from 1956 till January 1966 as well as other bibliographical material and thereby continuing Charlotte von Kirschbaum's initial Bibliography which rendered nearly all of Barth's writings up to the end of 1955.