A Lover's Discourse
Fragments
ISBN10: 0374532311
ISBN13: 9780374532314
Trade Paperback
256 Pages
$18.00
CA$24.00
The language of love is one of solitude and mythology. Spoken universally, it seems to the lover to belong to him only; addressed to the beloved, it reveals more of the amorous subject than it does of the obscure object ot his desire. Roland Barthes's most popular book, A Lover's Discourse, was revolutionary upon its 1978 publication: in it, Barthes, "one of the great public teachers of our time" (Peter Brooks), made unprecedented use of the tools of structuralism to explore the whimsical phenomenon of love and its corollary, the lover's discourse. Rich with references ranging from Goethe's Werther to Freud, from Plato to Proust, from Nietzsche to Baudelaire to Schubert, A Lover's Discourse artfully draws a portrait of the lover in which readers will recognize themselves.
Reviews
Praise for A Lover's Discourse
"Barthes's most popular and unusual performance as a writer is A Lover's Discourse, a writing out of the discourse of love. This language—primarily the complaints and reflections of the lover when alone, not exchanges of a lover with his or her partner—is unfashionable. Thought it is spoken by millions of people, diffused in our popular romances and television programs as well as in serious literature, there is no institution that explores, maintains, modifies, judges, repeats, and otherwise assumes responsibility for this discourse . . . Writing out the figures of a neglected discourse, Barthes surprises us in A Lover's Discourse by making love, in its most absurd and sentimental forms, an object of interest."—Jonathan Culler