Fabien Arribert-Narce – författare

Reading is a peculiar kind of experience. Although its practice and theory have a very long tradition, the question of aesthetic pleasure is as perplexing as ever. Why do we read? What exactly thrills us in the text? One of the most prominent scholars having addressed these questions in the twentieth century is undeniably Roland Barthes, who distinguished between the «ordinary» pleasure of reading and bliss (jouissance), a delight so profound that it cannot be expressed in words. Taking his work as a central reference, and revisiting some of his seminal publications on the subject such as Empire of Signs (1970) and The Pleasure of the Text (1973), this collection of essays adopts a similar interdisciplinary approach to explore a broad range of themes and issues related to the notion of readerly enjoyment, between form and content, emotion and reason, and escapist and knowledge-seeking responses to the text: how do literary and ideological pleasures intersect? In what ways do perversions, madness or even fatigue contribute to the pleasure of the text? How do writing and signs, sense and significance, but also image and text interact in the intermedial process of reading? How can paratexts – i.e. the margins of the text, including footnotes – and metatexts play a part in the reader’s enjoyment?

«This volume locates itself neatly in the growing collection of publications on intermediality by relating such practices to Roland Barthes. Barthesian motifs and writerly concerns are found within a variety of intermedial practices, as the analysis moves, historically and globally, across visual, aural and literary cultures. Such an approach is both appropriate and innovative within Barthes Studies and in cultural theory more generally.» (Andy Stafford, Professor of French and Critical Theory, University of Leeds)The essays in this collection reconsider Roland Barthes as a crucial figure in intermedia studies, arguing that the concepts and forms of analysis he pioneered are of continuing importance for students and scholars working in the field. These essays utilize an interdisciplinary methodology, drawing on Barthes’s own intermedial critical practice, to examine the multiple relationships between art, literature, music and performance and across different languages. The collection places Barthes’s writing in critical dialogue with other theorists, including Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Dick Higgins and Emmanuel Levinas, investigating the work of figures as varied as André Breton, Giordano Bruno, Alain Cavalier, Alfred Hitchcock, Marcel Schwob, W. G. Sebald, Steven Spielberg, Yoko Tawada and Lev Tolstoy. The collection demonstrates that Barthes’s intermedial critical and theoretical practice provides a means of challenging fixed critical narratives and exploring crucial intermedial issues, including how narrative crosses media, the close relationship between image and text throughout history, and how twentieth-century consumer capitalist culture transformed the relationship between image and text.