Album provides an unparalleled look into Roland Barthes's life of letters. It presents a selection of correspondence, from his adolescence in the 1930s through the height of his career and up to the last years of his life, covering such topics as friendships, intellectual adventures, politics, and aesthetics. It offers an intimate look at Barthes's thought processes and the everyday reflection behind the composition of his works, as well as a rich archive of epistolary friendships, spanning half a century, among the leading intellectuals of the day.
Barthes was one of the great observers of language and culture, and Album shows him in his element, immersed in heady French intellectual culture and the daily struggles to maintain a writing life. Barthes's correspondents include Maurice Blanchot, Michel Butor, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marthe Robert, and Jean Starobinski, among others. The book also features documents, letters, and postcards reproduced in facsimile; unpublished material; and notes and transcripts from his seminars. The first English-language publication of Barthes's letters, Album is a comprehensive testimony to one of the most influential critics and philosophers of the twentieth century and the world of letters in which he lived and breathed.
Foreword, by Éric Marty Death of the Father Encounter in the English Channel on the Night of October 26–27, 1916, Between German Destroyers and the Trawler Le Montaigne Acknowledgments Note Chronology 1. From Adolescence to the Romance of the Sanatorium: 1932–46 2. The First Barthes 3. The Great Ties 4. A Few Letters Regarding a Few Books 5. Exchanges Notes Index
Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. His works include Mythologies, S/Z, A Lover's Discourse, and Camera Lucida. Barthes's final seminars, The Neutral: Lecture Course at the College de France (1977-1978) (2005); The Preparation of the Novel: Lecture Courses and Seminars at the College de France (1978-1979 and 1979-1980) (2010); and How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces (2012), are also published by Columbia University Press. Jody Gladding is a poet and author most recently of Translations from Bark Beetle. She has translated thirty works from French, for which she has received grants from the Centre National du Livre and the French-American Foundation Translation Prize.
Reviews for Album: Unpublished Correspondence and Texts
The significance of this book-the first English-language publication of Barthes's correspondence-cannot be overestimated. Starting with Barthes's adolescence and the years in his late twenties spent in a sanatorium, these selected letters represent exchanges with longtime personal friends as well as many of the key figures of twentieth-century French intellectual history. -- Diana Knight, University of Nottingham
