Many of the contributors to this new collection of 14 essays on Barthes’ swansong approach the book in this way. Barthes was very close to his mother, and Camera Lucida has often been read as an elegiac piece of writing, or even as an act of mourning. In the first, Barthes sets out his theory of photography, analysing photographs and defining terms, while the second section is more personal, focusing on a photograph of his mother, who died in 1977. The mixture of the autobiographical and the critical persists in this text, with one of these two strands being dominant in each of the two sections the book is divided into. However, his most influential later work is his last book, Camera Lucida, published in 1980. This began in 1975 with Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, in which he playfully constructs a sort of autobiography, and continued with A Lover’s Discourse, a series of novelistic fragments written as if spoken by a fictional lover. Roland Barthes is well known for his writings as a literary critic and semiotician, but literature students who have had his essay ‘The Death of the Author’ shoved down their throats to the point that anything resembling post-structuralist thought induces a gag reflex, and many may not be aware that his later work displayed a softer, less theoretical side.
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