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Bored with Barthes: ennui in China
Full text linkBetween 11 April and 4 May 1974, Roland Barthes visited Mao’s China. Accompanying him on the trip were François Wahl and, representing Tel Quel, Julia Kristeva, Marcelin Pleynet, and Philippe Sollers. Barthes published a short, disaffected piece on the experience in Le Monde shortly after his return, but the true scale and level of his disappointment did not become apparent until 2009, when several journals that he filled during the trip were published in French as Carnets du voyage en Chine; an English translation, Travels in China, followed in 2012. After tracing the neglected history of boredom in Barthes more generally, this essay examines the overwhelming ennui articulated in Travels in China. If Barthes is, as Steven Ungar argued many years ago, a professor of desire, I propose here that he is also a professor of boredom. What Travels in China allows us to see is the significance of Barthes’s discussions of ennui and the relationship between boredom and the familiar Barthesian theme of doxa. Scholarly accounts of ennui tend to overlook Barthes or reduce him to a single line from The Pleasure of the Text, but I argue that we might correct this oversight and begin at last to read Barthes as a remarkable professor of boredom
Posthumanist (com)promises: diffracting Donna Haraway's Cyborg through Marge Piercy's Body of Glass
No full textPreface
No full textThe Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory (YWCCT) is a companion to The Year’s Work in English Studies (YWES), and like that journal it provides a narrative bibliography of books and articles published in the field. Volume 23 of YWCCT is a transitional affair. Whereas previous issues of the journal have surveyed work published two years earlier, from volume 24 (2016) onwards we will reduce that gap to one year in order to provide readers with a more up-to-date publication. To make that shift possible, the present volume covers work published in 2013 and 2014 – with some overlap into adjacent years where relevant – under the following headings: Animal Studies; Disability Studies; Psychoanalysis; Economic Criticism; Modern European Philosophy; Poetics; Media; Film Theory; Drama and Performance Studies; Feminisms; Postcolonial Theory; Theory on Theory; Popular Culture: Music;..
The afterlives of Roland Barthes
No full textRoland Barthes – the author of such enduringly influential works as Mythologies and Camera Lucida - was one of the most important cultural critics of the post-war era. Since his death in 1980, new writings have continued to be discovered and published. The Afterlives of Roland Barthes is the first book to revisit and reassess Barthes' thought in light of these posthumously published writings. Covering work such as Barthes' Mourning Diary, the notes for his projected Vita Nova and many writings yet to be translated into English, Neil Badmington reveals a very different Barthes of today than the figure familiar from the writings published in his lifetime
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