Album

November 13, 2017
This selection of unpublished letters, exchanges, and seminar material, which dates from Barthes’s adolescence until about a year before his death in 1980, offers charming insights into the famous literary critic’s development as a writer and thinker. Even as a teenager, Barthes is eloquent and candid about literature, extolling Marcel Proust to a friend while admitting he liked the second volume of À la recherche du temps perdu less than the first (and wondering if that’s because he’s still too young). A brief selection of Barthes’s letters to a man with whom the author was infatuated yields reflections on how love “illuminates for us our imperfection.” Very brief exchanges with prominent cultural theorists, including Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, and Alain Robbe-Grillet, mostly convey mutual admiration. More informative are Barthes’s seminar materials on the role of the sentence in Gustave Flaubert’s unfinished Bouvard et Pécuchet, illustrating Barthes’s structuralist approach to literature, and on Paul Valéry’s rhetoric. Barthes reflects on his own experiences in “Sketch of a Sanatorium Society,” written when he was in his late 20s, which concludes that the bourgeoisie see sanatoriums “as a substitute for rediscovered childhood.” This new glimpse into a celebrated career will be rewarding to Barthes scholars, though less so to casual admirers of the author’s work. Agent: Valerie Borchardt, Georges Borchardt Inc.