Roland Barthes by Andy Stafford (review)

dernier chapitre, “Extinction et subversion des mythes”, déconstruit les figures mythologiques comme celle du griot et examine les conséquences des indépendances sur certaines traditions culturelles. La déchéance morale du“maître de la parole”(189), précisément le griot de la ville qui galvaude l’art de la parole pour gagner sa vie rend compte de cette problématique à l’origine des frustrations de Fama, le personnage principal de Les soleils des indépendances, qui ne comprend pas comment tout griot qui maîtrise son art peut confondre la lignée des Keita et celle des Doumbouya. En outre, cette mythocritique donne lieu à une analyse comparative de la symbolique du village et de la ville, qui correspond respectivement à la tradition et à l’intégrité morale contre la modernité et la perte des valeurs culturelles. De telles problématiques, sans être caricaturales, illustrent l’existence de tensions figuratives au sein du corpus littéraire de Kourouma et qui font l’objet d’analyses multidisciplinaires dans cette étude critique. Un ouvrage très fortement recommandé. University of Texas, El Paso Parfait Bonkoungou Stafford, Andy. Roland Barthes. London: Reaktion, 2015. ISBN 978-1-78023-495-3. Pp. 191. £12. Coinciding with the “year of Barthes” is the publication of Stafford’s concise yet expertly researched biography. The text consists of seven chapters, and opens with a portrait of the author’s childhood in the Basque region. This study traces what are arguably the most important pillars of Barthes’s life and career, including his contributions to semiotic studies, structuralist and post-structuralist thought, as well as his transition from École to Collège (124). While less detailed than lengthier biographies, this English-language text yields a sufficient overview of Barthes’s work, providing even a novice reader with the necessary framework to appreciate his critical positioning of literary, cultural, and language studies.With these various thematics in mind and following Stafford’s cue, the reviewer would agree that assigning a given genre to the writer’s work is not only an insurmountable task, but in so doing one would risk negating what is, for the French critic, le plaisir du texte. Of particular interest is an excellent analysis of the influences of May 68 in relation to Barthes’s intellectual engagement (93), as well as his shift from structuralism to post-structuralism during the tumultuous mid-1960s. Furthermore, this section underscores what was, for the writer, a period that can be qualified by a well-documented preference to go against the grain of contentious student protests. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Barthes kept distant from widespread practices of political militancy. This being said, Stafford draws attention to the fact that Barthes was curiously enamored with the graffiti that appeared in central Paris during these years of transition, prompting the critic to refer to the wall as a“fundamental place of collective writing”(103). Furthermore , readers will appreciate numerous references to the overarching influences of 246 FRENCH REVIEW 90.4 Reviews 247 Barthes’s travels in his writing and personal relationships. Stafford contemplates a series of important voyages, including a number of influential trips to the Far East (89), as well as his residency in Morocco in the late 1960s while working as a visiting professor at Mohammed V University in Rabat (104). The 1970s ushered in a new era, and as the biographer states, Barthes returned to a“new, more modern France”(114). His homecoming was marked by increased public interest in his work, opening up a vulnerable space of intimacy characterized in part by veiled homosexuality. Such an invasion of the private propelled Barthes to analyze constructs of self, culminating in the publication of Sade, Fourier et Loyola. Non-Barthesian scholars will be interested to learn that the writer equally turned to unconventional subject matter in his quest to study language and form, including an often-overlooked preoccupation with fashion, which he studied through a post-structuralist lens. According to him, any given outfit can be redefined and redirected through a series of micro-changes (117). The simplicity and ease of Stafford’s writing style is refreshing and welcomed, although this series is not intended to...