Roland Barthes The Proust Variations

Download or read book Roland Barthes written by Thomas Baldwin and published by . This book was released on with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By confronting the singularity of the relationship between two exemplary writers of the last century, this text challenges and reinvigorates our notions of what art and criticism - literary or otherwise - can do. While it takes Roland Barthes's encounters with Marcel Proust's monumental masterpiece la recherche du temps perdu as its specific focus, the implications of its argument are far-reaching. Indeed, the work argues that Barthes's writing on Proust's work between the early 1950s and 1980 (including a substantial set of unpublished notes for a seminar delivered at the University of Rabat in 1969-1970) proposes not only a critical culture of Proust that is productively inconsistent, but also, more generally, a fresh understanding of criticism as a creative activity that embraces insecurity and variation as it refuses to remain fixed upon reassuringly stable themes, meanings and interpretations.