Afterlives of Roland Barthes

Neil Badmington is Professor of English at Cardiff University, UK. His previous books include Hitchcock's Magic (2011) and Alien Chic: Posthumanism and the Other Within (2004) and he is the co-editor (with David Tucker) of The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory.

An exploration of Roland Barthes’s posthumously published writings, Neil Badmington’s book offers an important contribution to Barthes Studies. Badmington’s text, both pedagogically accessible and convincingly argued, places import on Barthes’s posthumous literature, which includes Mourning Diary, Travels in China, and the unfinished Vita Nova, to reappraise the major texts published during the semiotician’s lifetime … The critical rigour, clarity, and accessibility of Badmington’s text would be appreciate by Barthesian scholars and university students working from the perspective of both French and Anglophone Studies. The wealth of accompanying end-of-chapter notes offers rich biographical details and bibliographic references, which further underscore this work’s dialogic contribution to Barthes Studies. Far from haunting, as Badmington reminds us, Barthes’s afterlives are very much kept alive in the interstitial pleasures and boredoms of his prose.

• 1 Introduction: The Afterlives of Roland Barthes 2 For Henriette’s Tomb: Mourning with Mallarmé3 Punctum Saliens: Mourning, Film, Photography4 The ‘Inkredible’ Roland Barthes 5 Bored with Barthes: Ennui in China6 Hitchcock Hapax: Realism RevisitedPostscript: Afterlives’ AfterlivesBibliographyIndex