is subject of symposium
A symposium titled "Back to Barthes: Twenty Years After" will take place Friday and Saturday, Dec. 8 and 9, at the Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall St.
Friday's session will take place 2-6 p.m., and Saturday's 10 a.m.-6 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.
The symposium will reassess the work of French critic and theorist Roland Barthes 20 years after he was killed suddenly, struck by a van in a Paris street. The symposium takes up each of the various threads of Barthes' thought, bringing together scholars from a range of fields to reassess his efforts to found a "science of signs," its uses in literary and cultural analysis, and its subsequent changes -- in Barthes's own thought, and in the evolution of literary and cultural studies.
According to the event's organizers, rather than trying to integrate or systematize Barthes' work -- a project, they say, that would be anathema to Barthes himself -- the symposium seeks to represent the many faces and voices of his work, and to understand his importance for literary and cultural criticism today.
The panelists include Susan Sontag, Jonathan Culler, Raymond Bellour, Yve-Alain Bois, Malcolm Bowie, D.A. Miller, Michael Riffaterre and the poet Michel Deguy.
Barthes began his career in the early 1950s. His early work, found in "Writing Degree Zero," "Mythologies" and the "Critical Essays," advances a method of reading literature and culture that dismantles stereotype and cliché. With the later "Elements of Semiology," "Système de la mode" and "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative," he joined in the effort to found semiology, a "science of signs." For Barthes, however, the effort to analyze the structure of language itself soon shifted into producing a theory of reading.
Barthes's work drew upon the subjects, as well as the methodologies, of many fields. His work on photography in "Camera Lucida" became a seminal work not only for scholars of photography, but for anyone interested in the visual as such. Near the end of his career, Barthes turned to reading himself, producing the "autobiographical" work "Barthes by Himself, A Lover's Discourse" and the posthumous "Incidents."
The conference is sponsored jointly by the Whitney Humanities Center, the Department of French, with a grant from the French Embassy, and the Kempf Fund. For more information, contact the Whitney Humanities Center at (203) 432-0670 or go to www.yale.edu/whc.
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