‘The “Scandal” of Marxism’ and Other Writings on Politics

Essays and Interviews, Volume 2
Translated by Chris Turner
₹499.00 $17 £13.99

A major collection of essays and interviews from an iconic 20th-century philosopher in five volumes.

Roland Barthes was a restless, protean thinker. A constant innovator—often as a daring smuggler of ideas from one discipline to another—he first gained an audience with his pithy essays on mass culture and then went on to produce some of the most suggestive and stimulating cultural criticism of the late twentieth century, including Empire of SignsThe Pleasure of the Text, and Camera Lucida. In 1976, this one-time structuralist outsider was elected to a chair at France’s preeminent Collège de France, where he chose to style himself as a professor of literary semiology until his death in 1980.
 
The greater part of Barthes’s published writings has been available to a French audience since 2002, but now, translator Chris Turner presents a collection of essays, interviews, prefaces, book reviews, and other journalistic material for the first time in English and divided into five themed volumes. Volume two, The “Scandal” of Marxism, contains a wide range of his more overtly political writings, with an emphasis on his early work and the serious national turbulence in the French 1950s.

 

The most striking quality in this volume of newly translated essays by Barthes, written between 1950 and 1977, is their freshness [. . .] A humane and consistent vision threads through them: Barthes asserts firmly that literature matters, those in power lie, and killing for the sake of a doctrine is wrong. He writes with a clarity and brevity that strike to the heart of issues still relevant decades after his death: race, propaganda, abuse of power [. . .] This collection is strongly recommended: it more than repays the reader’s time and effort.’Publishers Weekly
 
 
ISBN: 9781803092775
Size: 5" x 8"
Rights: UCP
Format: Paperback
Publication Year: August 2023
Pages: 138
Category: Politics
Shipping: Shipping rates will be calculated at checkout and will depend on your location.

If you are ordering from India, your order will be shipped from Seagull Books, Calcutta.

If you are ordering from the US or the UK or anywhere else in the world, your order will be shipped from the University of Chicago Press' distribution centre, Chicago.

Please note: For customers paying in currencies other than Indian rupee or US dollar, prices will be calculated according to the currency conversion rate at the time of purchase and may vary from the printed price.

Reviews

leave a review