Andy Stafford

This work sets out to find Barthes somewhere in the dialogue between the writer and his time. The author attempts to explain the work by an earlier Barthes, suggesting influences and investigating the reception of his work along the way.

An Intellectual Biography

Roland Barthes, Phenomenon and Myth

Charles Forsdick

As a textual form, the essai predominates in modern and contemporary literature in French. Emerging from an earlier tradition and distinguished from its English-language counterpart, the French-language essay ranges from Stéphane Mallarmé to Colette, Victor Segalen to Aimé Césaire, Jean Grenier to Pierre Michon. The essai remains, however, one of the most hazily identified of textual forms, its definition often depending on the progressive elimination of all other generic possibilities. Excluded from the archigenres (theatre, poetry, récit), it can even be seen as a hold-all category whose role is to absorb the anarchic extremes of writing. It is perhaps this very lack of pretension to orthodoxy that has drawn so many writers to the essai. The conventional understanding of the term - as a tentative, unsystematic exploration - stresses the genre's provisional nature, its refusal of any claims to comprehensiveness. The essai exploits the devices of anecdote, illustration and humour; it is addressed to a wide and often general audience; it is also intricately linked to the performance of ideological and writerly strategies, often reordering the classical art of rhetoric and persuasion. As the contributions to this volume show, there is a need to outline an ethics and politics, as well as poetics, of essayism.

Movement, Instability, Performance

The Modern Essay in French

In today’s image-saturated society, photograph and text live side-by-side, engaged in a complex collaboration. Andy Stafford critically examines this interplay in Photo-texts, taking nine case studies from the 1990s French-speaking world and looking at the interaction between non-fictional written texts (caption, essay, fragment, poem) and photographic images. The “photo-text,” as he defines it, is concerned as much with the oral as it is with visual and written culture. That text-image collaborations give space to the spoken, spectral traces of spoken human discourse suggests that the key element of the photo-text is its radical provisionality—that it is inherently unstable and ever-changing. This pathbreaking study offers a vital resource for scholars in contemporary French and francophone cultures.

Contemporary French Writing of the Photographic Image

Photo-texts

In this cogent, accessible biography, Andy Stafford offers a new picture of the man and his work, one that helps us to understand him even as it acknowledges the complexity presented by his restless interests and unorthodox career. Stafford argues that Barthes is best classified as a journalist, essayist, and critic, and he emphasizes the social preoccupations in his work—how Barthes continually worked to analyze the self and society, as well as the self in society. In doing so, Stafford paints a fascinating picture not just of Barthes, but of the entire intellectual scene of postwar France. As Barthes continues to find new readers today, this book will make the perfect introduction, even as it offers new avenues of thought for specialists.

Andy Stafford

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