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Roland Barthes
In this cogent, accessible biography, Andy Stafford offers a new picture of the man and his work, one that helps us to understand him even as it acknowledges the complexity presented by his restless interests and unorthodox career. Stafford argues that Barthes is best classified as a journalist, essayist, and critic, and he emphasizes the social preoccupations in his work—how Barthes continually worked to analyze the self and society, as well as the self in society. In doing so, Stafford paints a fascinating picture not just of Barthes, but of the entire intellectual scene of postwar France. As Barthes continues to find new readers today, this book will make the perfect introduction, even as it offers new avenues of thought for specialists.
The Conte
A majority of the chapters in this book were originally presented as papers at a conference held at Queen's University Belfast in September 2006. The volume explores the oral-written dynamic in the conte français/francophone, focusing on key aspects of the relationship between oral and written forms of the conte. The chapters fall into four broad thematic areas (the oral-written dynamic in early modern France; literary appropriations and transformations; postcolonial contexts; storytelling in contemporary France: linguistic strategies). Within these broad areas, some chapters deal with sources and influences (such as that of written on oral and vice versa), others with the nature of the dis...
Something to Believe In
Set to the soundtrack of music that has shaped a generation, Something To Believe In will resonate with anyone whose life has been saved by rock 'n' roll. Born in Melbourne's outer suburbs in the 1970s, Andrew Stafford grew up in a time when music was a way out and a way up. His passion for rock 'n' roll led him to a career as a journalist and music critic, but along the way his battles with family illness, mental health and destructive relationships threatened to take him down. Andrew Stafford delves bravely and deeply into a life that has been shaped and saved by music's beat. From the author of the cult classic Pig City comes a memoir of music, madness, and love.
Photo-texts
What do photographs want? Do they need any accompaniment in today's image-saturated society? Can writing inflect photography (or vice versa) in such a way that neither medium takes precedence? Or are they in constant, inexorable battle with each other? Taking nine case studies from the 1990s French-speaking world (from France, North Africa and the Caribbean), this book attempts to define the interaction between non-fictional written text (caption, essay, fragment, poem) and photographic image. Having considered three categories of 'intermediality' between text and photography - the collaborative, the self-collaborative and the retrospective - the book concludes that the dimensions of their interaction are not simple and two-fold (visuality versus/alongside textuality), but threefold and therefore 'complex'. Thus, the photo-text, as defined here, is concerned as much with orality - the demotic, the popular, the vernacular - as it is with visual and written culture. That text-image collaborations give space to the spoken, spectral traces of human discourse, suggests that the key element of the photo-text is its radical provisionality.
The Language of Fashion
Roland Barthes was one of the most widely influential thinkers of the 20th Century and his immensely popular and readable writings have covered topics ranging from wrestling to photography. The semiotic power of fashion and clothing were of perennial interest to Barthes and The Language of Fashion - now available in the Bloomsbury Revelations series - collects some of his most important writings on these topics. Barthes' essays here range from the history of clothing to the cultural importance of Coco Chanel, from Hippy style in Morocco to the figure of the dandy, from colour in fashion to the power of jewellery. Barthes' acute analysis and constant questioning make this book an essential read for anyone seeking to understand the cultural power of fashion.
Anticolonial Form
Anticolonial Form: Literary Journals at the End of Empire addresses the relationship between culture and politics in two journals published in Europe by African writers: Présence Africaine, launched in Paris in 1947, and Mensagem, published between 1948 and 1964 in Lisbon. Grounded in extensive archival work, the book argues for a comparative and transnational approach to postcolonial literary studies, for the significance of the literary journal as a key form in the development of African writing in French, Portuguese, and English, and for a historically and geographically contingent understanding of the relationships between literature, culture, and politics. This book takes up the idea o...
Visions of African Unity
This collection of essays analyzes different iterations of African unity, exploring the political and cultural visions that informed projects aimed at African unification. It explores the cultural, economic and non-state aspects of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) as the principal institution dedicated to the cooperation of African states, from its establishment in 1963 to its transformation into the African Union (AU) in 2000, as well as how ideas of African unity shaped the Cold War and African liberation struggles. Bringing together contributors from a diverse range of disciplinary backgrounds across Africa, Europe and the US, this book investigates the ideological origins and historiography of Pan-African and unification projects, and considers how African intellectuals, leaders and populations engaged with these ideas.
Roland Barthes Writing the Political
Roland Barthes and the Political: Dialectics of Historiography, Politics and Self re-reads and re-purposes for the twenty-first century France's most important writer of the twentieth century. It argues that Barthes's wide-ranging analyses - from Voltaire to Nietzsche, Marx to myth, gay love to Japan - can be applied to debates and controversies in the contemporary world, in what he called the writer's 'double grasp'.
Fashion through History
This collection arises from an international fashion conference held at Sapienza University in Rome, Italy, in May 2015. It is dedicated to one of the main indicators of social change, fashion, analysed within various scientific fields, historical periods, and geographical areas. It offers a comprehensive and detailed analysis of the world of clothes, starting from a historical perspective, religious clothes, and traditional costumes, and then exploring fashion theories and more recent approaches and developments in the media and advertisements. The book analyses the clothing of various cultures, including the Hittite peoples and the less explored fashion of Eastern Europe, and it deals with craft traditions and national costume in different areas, including China, Greece, Romania and Georgia. It also investigates the style of marginalized groups and youth movements and the interpretation of fashion in the studies and writings of sociologists, philosophers and linguists, such as Fausto Squillace and Christian Garve.
Exiles, Travellers and Vagabonds
Travel writing, migrant writing, exile writing, expatriate writing, and even the fictional travelling protagonists that emerge in literary works from around the globe, have historically tended to depict mobility as a masculine phenomenon. The presence of such genres in women’s writing, however, poses a rich and unique body of work. This volume examines the texts of Francophone women who have experienced or reflected upon the experience of transnational movement. Due to the particularity of their relationship to home, and the consequent impact of this on their experience of displacement, the study of women's mobility opens up new questions in our understanding of the movement from place to place, and in our broader understanding of colonial and postcolonial worlds. Addressing the proximities and overlaps that exist between the experiences of women exiles, migrants, expatriates and travellers, the collected essays in this book seek to challenge the usefulness, relevance or validity of such terms for conceptualising today’s complex patterns of transnational mobility and the gendered identities produced therein.
