Skip to main content
Trade Books For Courses Tradebooks for Courses

A Lover's Discourse

Fragments

Roland Barthes; Translated from the French by Richard Howard; Foreword by Wayne Koestenbaum

Hill and Wang

opens in a new window
opens in a new window A Lover's Discourse Download image

ISBN10: 0374532311
ISBN13: 9780374532314

Trade Paperback

256 Pages

$18.00

CA$24.00

Request Desk Copy
Request Exam Copy

TRADE BOOKS FOR COURSES NEWSLETTER

Sign up to receive information about new books, author events, and special offers.

Sign up now

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

Reviews from Goodreads