Critical Essays

About this book

The essays in this volume were written during the years that its authors first four books were published in France. They chart the course of Barthes criticism from the vocabularies of existentialism and Marxism (reflections on the social situation of literature and writers responsibility before History) to a psychoanalysis of substances (after Bachelard) and a psychoanalytical anthropology (which evidently brought Barthes to his present terms of understanding with Levi-Strauss and Lacan).