Mireille Ribière

Penguin Classics Introduction to The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux (Penguin Classics)

Jan Baetens

This volume focuses on the relationship between time, narrative and the fixed image. As such, it highlights renewed interest in the temporality of the fixed image, probably one of the most important trends in the formal and semiotic analysis of visual media in the past decade. The various essays discuss paintings, the illustrated covers of books, comics or graphic novels, photo-stories, postcards, television and video art, as well as aesthetic practices that defy categorization such as Chris Marker's masterpiece La Jetée. The range of works and practices examined is reflected in the different theoretical approaches and methods used, with an emphasis on semiology and narratology, and, to a lesser extent, aesthetics and psychoanalysis. The interest of this book, however, does not stem exclusively from the range and scope of the artefacts examined, or the methodological issues that are addressed; its fundamental importance rests in the contributors' readiness to question the differentiation between fixed and moving images which all too often provides a convenient, if not altogether convincing, starting point for image analysis. . The originality and value of the contribution that Time, Narrative and the Fixed Image/Temps, Narration et image fixe makes to the body of theoretical writing on visual media lies in this challenging and comprehensive approach.

Temps, Narration Et Image Fixe

This comprehensive presentation of Roland Barthes’s work tracks his intellectual evolution, with particular emphasis on those areas where his influence is felt most strongly today. Key stages in Barthes’s intellectual itinerary are discussed in seven core chapters: Mythologies; Semiology; New criticism; Structuralism; Reader writer and text; Pleasure, the body and the self; and Photography. In each chapter concepts are contextualised so that the reader may understand the issues debated during the period under scrutiny, and the strength and originality of Barthes’s contribution to those debates surrounding cultural forms. The successive shifts in Barthes’s thought are also carefully explained and highlighted to avoid any confusion in the readers mind between concepts or theories developed at different stages. Another three chapters (Barthes in perspective; Barthes’s legacy; and Paradox: a way of thinking) offer an overview of Barthes’s career and a general assessment of his place in the intellectual landscape of the last fifty years.

Mireille Ribière

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