Barthes, Writing, and The Subject.

Hi,
for those who attended last week they would have colected the reading Roland Barthes 'The Death of the Author from his book 'Image, Music, Text'.

If you weren't there it's such a classic text it should be easy to get hold of in the library or online (it's also found in anthologies.)

It's also a short text and relatively easy to digest. This evening I want to use it, firstly to continue our investigation of ideas of the Subject (this time through writing and language -though we have experienced similar Structuralist approaches to the Subject already).

Secondly, we can use this text to perhaps loosen-up our own concerns about our essay writing.

I come back repeatedly to the essay because I want to stress the essay is not an external or add-on component of our seminar but always integral, always on our mind as the outcome of our conversations.

Last week we heard from a few students, their initial thoughts, and I believe that airing ideas in this way -however undeveloped, helps build confidence in them and invites helpful comments from myself and your peers.

But to quickly turn to the Barthes essay, it is such a classic that you may be familiar with it, nevertheless, as I say, it does refer specifically to recent considerations of the Subject. It also posits the way in which literature and its writing have come to influence our idea of the subject (perhaps particularly in the references to Proust and to Greek theatre).

Our relationship with God is even called into question by our approach to writing which Barthes calls an 'anti-theological activity', and he also refers to 'Performativity' (which we will also see in Judith butler) and the speed, moment or 'event' of writing - and of reading.

As it is a short but very rich text we can work through it together in the class.

We will also use the session to review our progress, discuss essays and essay writing, and consider literature in general as an influence on the subject.

I conclude this post with a relevant quote, Julian Barnes writing in from the current issue of 'The London Review of Books' (volume 31, number 21, p.28)

"What Mariolle discovers is that the modern woman is not able to love as deeply as her predecessor: she is able to attract, entrap and seduce, but even in intimacy there is a final witholding of heart and body - which, of course, becomes a source of further power. And this change in women, Mariolle decides, is the fault of literature. As he puts it to Lamarthe

In the days when poets and novelists exalted women and made them dream ... they sought and believed they found in their lives the same things that their hearts responded to in books. today you eliminate all the poetic trappings in order to reveal nothing but disillusioning realities. And when there's no love left in books, my dear fellow, there's no love in life.

This complaint against literature from within literature is very French; it also directs us back to an earlier and more famous such complaint, that in Madame Bovary, Emma is the typical reader of those romantic books which make women dream and give their hearts expectation -though look where it got her. Indeed, Flaubert's novel deals in precisely the sort of disillusioning realities' Mariolle is now complaining about."

These thoughts relate to one of the original quotes I placed on the first Blog posts concerning the literary 'type' Oblomov (see 'Older Posts' below) " Oblomov hmself is not sure he is a person. He thinks he may be a type, and that is what he is usually taken to be. Early in the novel he looks at his fabulously slovenly servant and thinks 'well, brother, you're more of an Oblomov than I am' - as if he has read the book and recognised himself. "(Michael Wood's review of ‘Oblomov’ by Goncharov LRB August 2009 p. 8.).

But we could also use it to pick up our promised discussion of Ishiguro's novel 'Never Let Me go' in which the literary clone characters seem to have lost much 'human' feeling.