CUP.COLUMBIA.EDU

| 1

CUP.COLUMBIA.EDU

| 1

How to Live Together

Roland Barthes

Translated by Kate Briggs

THE SEMINAL LECTURES THA T SET BARTHES ON HIS EPIC COURSE TO EXPLORE THE COLLABORATIVE POTENTIAL OF READING, WRITING, AND NEW NARRA TIVE FORMS.

In

The Preparation of the Novel

, a collection of lectures delivered at a deﬁning moment in Roland Barthes’s career (and completed just weeks before his death), the critic spoke of his struggle to discover a diﬀerent way of writing and a new approach to life.

The Neutral

preceded this work, containing Barthes’s challenge to the classic oppositions of Western thought and his eﬀort to establish new pathways of meaning.

How to Live Together

predates both achievements, a series of lectures exploring solitude and the degree of contact necessary for individuals to exist and create at their own pace. A distinct project that sets the tone for his subse- quent lectures,

How to Live Together

is a key introduction to Barthes’s pedagogical methods and critical worldview. Barthes focuses on the concept of “idiorrhythmy,” a produc- tive form of living together in which one recognizes and respects the individual rhythms of the other. He explores this phenomen on in ﬁve texts represen ting d iﬀerent living spaces and their associated ways of life: Émile Zola’s

Pot- Bouille

, set in a Parisian apartment building; Thomas Mann’s

The Magic Mountain

, which takes place in a sana- torium; André Gide’s

La séquestrée de Poitiers

, based on the true story of a woman conﬁned to her bedroom; Daniel Defoe’s

Robinson Crusoe

, about a castaway on a remote is- land; and Pallidius’s

Lausiac History

, on the ascetic lives of the desert fathers. As with his previous lecture books,

How to Live Together

exempliﬁes Barthes’s singular approach to teaching, in which he invites his audience to investigate with him, or for him, and wholly incorporates them into his discoveries. Rich with playful observations and sugges- tive, clarifying prose,

How to Live Together

is a foundational text orienting English-speaking readers to the full power of Barthes’s intellectual adventures.

ROLAND

BARTHES

(1915–1980) was a French literary theorist, phi- losopher, critic, and semiotician. His books include

The Preparation of the Novel

;

The Neutral

;

Mythologies

;

S/Z

;

A Lov er’s Discourse

; and

Camera Lucida

. Barthes’s work has been central to the delineation and development of numerous schools of theory, including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology, and poststructuralism.

KATE

BRIGGS

is the translator of Roland Barthes’s

The Preparation of the Novel

.

“Roland Barthes repeatedly com- pared teaching to play, reading to eros, writing to seduction. His voice became more and more personal, more full of grain, as he called it; his intellectual art more openly a performance, like that of the other great anti-systematizers. . . . All of Barthes’s work is an exploration of the histrionic or lucidic; in many ingenious modes, a plea for savor, for a festive (rather than dogmatic or credulous) relation to ideas. For Barthes, the point is to make us bold, agile, subtle, intelligent, detached. And to give pleasure”

—Susan Sontag

$26.95t / £18.95

paper 978-0-231-13617-4

$84.50 / £58.50

cloth 978-0-231-13616-7

DECEMBER

224 pages, 7

x

10

LITERARY CRITICISM

EUROPEAN PERSPECTIVES: A SERIES IN SOCIAL THOUGHT AND CULTURAL CRITICISM