Roland Barthes' Autobiography

Author: Roland Barthes (France)
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2007-02-11
Features: Roland Barthes' Autobiography is a richly contented book. It includes three parts: Roland Barthes' Autobiography, The Writer Sollers, and Encounters. Originally, these were three independent books. Autobiography is a non-traditional self-reflective text written by the author for the Eternal Writers series. It is organized for readers in a fragmented writing style and alphabetical order of fragmentary titles, creating a "strange book" with dislocated time, chaotic events, and illogical internal coherence. The author attempts to explain speech activities through fragments and explores the deep meanings of linguistic symbols through the arbitrary arrangement of language. Autobiography includes the author's discussions on various aspects of his personal life, aesthetic ideals, philosophical views, and more. The Writer Sollers collects Roland Barthes' discussions on Sollers' several works, affirming the author's innovative attempts and providing an in-depth interpretation of Sollers' writing from the perspectives of narratology, linguistics, and semiotics. Encounters gathers three aspects of content written in different periods, presenting countless "encounters" in the form of fragmented conversations and showcasing a postmodern collage style. The latter half of Encounters reflects Roland Barthes' delicate emotions as a person. In it, the author discloses his homosexual privacy and expresses his feelings of loneliness in his later years.