Barthes (A Graphic Guide)’ is a little introduction for french écrivain (writer) Roland Barthes. First half of this book takes up Barthes’s semiology and structuralism, second half of it explains Barthes’s literary critic. The former explains some semiological concepts and arguments giving some examples such as ‘all-in wrestling’, religion, fashion and ideology. The later explains Barthes’s literary critic to Jean Racine’s plays, Balzac’s ‘Sarrasine’, and logothetes (founder of launguage) of ‘Sade, Fourier, Loyola’.
This book attempt to critic and analysis of Barthes and his theory by his background and context the German Occupation of 1940-44, the student rebellion, the french petit bourgeois society and Marxism, Sartre’s existentialism, Freudianism, structuralism, post-structuralism. And the author described ‘Barthes as a kind of hedgehog, interested as a system whose understanding depends not upon its content but on the reactions which the signs it exploits evoke in the mind of the reader.’ Then cartoons of Barthes says ‘When I say or write something, I prevent something else from being said. I cannot help this. It is an inescapable property of language’ and ‘Texts are always open, always subject to being re-write in the mind of the reader. Literature is the proof and the assertion of human freedom.’ This kind of a post-structuralism or post-modernism view can apply Barthes’s works and this book. It’s a conclusion of this book and the thought of Barthes author of this book thinks.
A good point of this book is the graphical explanation such as ‘essential emptiness’ ‘Iganatius of Loyola’s combinatory’. And illustrations can consider the Barthes and his arguments objectively.
A problem of this book is the explanations of concept of sign in semiology. I have apprehension that beginners of semiology mistakes sign in semiology is the same as symbol, icon, characteristic or peculiarity, by the explanations and illustrations. But sign in semiology is all of artificial things and expressions includes unconscious ordinary things and phenomenons.
Introducing Barthes (A Graphic Guide)
Philip Thody, Piero
Icon Books, London, Jane 14 2011
176pp $9.95 £6.99
ISBN: 978-184831-204-3