Contents
Front Matter
Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Preface
Expand1 Introduction: Roland Barthes, an Interdisciplinary Subject
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Part I Myths, History, and Images
Expand2 Barthes’s Frenchness
Philippe Roger
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3 Barthes’s Myths of America
Jonathan Culler
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4 The Intelligible versus the Real: Barthes’s Historiographical Option
Stephen Bann
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5 Time and Space: Barthes and the Discourse of History
Maria O’sullivan
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Expand6 Barthes and the Visibility Turn: For a Non-Mimetic Image
Éric Marty
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Expand7 Picturing Barthes: The Photographic Construction of Authorship
Kathrin Yacavone
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Part II Religion, Philosophy, and Ethics
8 Barthes and Religion
Michael Moriarty
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Expand9 Barthes and the Lessons of Ancient Philosophy
Lucy O’Meara
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Expand10 Barthes and ‘Subtle Forms of Living’
Marielle Macé
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Expand11 ‘A Country Free by Default’: Barthes and the Atmospheric Experience of Literature
Kris Pint
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Expand12 Barthes and Insignificant Music
François Noudelmann
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Expand13 Barthes and the Emotions
Patrizia Lombardo
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Part III Writing, Criticism, and the Archive
Expand14 Barthes and Commissioned Writing
Antoine Compagnon
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Expand15 Barthes’s Menippean Moment: Creative Criticism 1966–70
Andy Stafford
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Expand16 From Fichier to OEuvre: Barthes and the ‘Our Literature’ Project
Claude Coste
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Expand17 Barthes, the Desire to Write, and the Prevision of the Work
Anne Herschberg Pierrot
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Expand18 Barthes’s Ordinary Writing
Tiphaine Samoyault
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End Matter
Index

Abstract
The disciplinary range of Barthes’s work is unusually diverse, as is that of its reception. An energetic contributor to the human sciences in postwar France, Barthes is credited with a pivotal role in the emergence of interdisciplinarity. But Barthes was alert to its recuperation by the technocratic higher-education reforms of 1968, referring to ‘the myth of interdisciplinarity’. He was equally wary of a federation of disciplines that would leave each one comfortably unchanged, rather than overturning the intellectual landscape. A more fertile interdisciplinarity originates in Barthes’s intensive reading of Michelet in the sanatorium. It is tracked through his euphoric discovery of structuralism to his teaching at the École pratique des hautes études, and his idiosyncratic aspirations for a ‘peripatetic’ chair of literary semiology at the Collège de France. Barthes was interested in the historically shifting hierarchies of disciplines, noting the equal status of the trivium and quadrivium within the medieval septenium, and bemoaning the downgrading of language to mere instrumentality within the contemporary human sciences. Literature, which already contains within it all forms of knowledge, is proposed as a transformative discipline despite its current exclusion, a corrective for the refusal of the human sciences to pay attention to their discourse.