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NEW CRITICAL ESSAYS

Eight not-so-new essays, as ingenious and exasperating as ever, by the late M. Barthes. These pieces, which date from 1964 to 1971, were originally published along with Le degré zéro de l'écriture in 1972. They add nothing of substance to the Barthesian canon (most are brief reflections on classic, or at least familiar, French authors, from La Rochefoucauld to Proust), but they provide a sampling of all that is most brilliant—and most dubious—in the work of the great Structuralist mandarin. For all his scientific pretensions (and his pedantic love of abstruse terms), Barthes was a poet. His style, to which translator Richard Howard does almost perfect justice, positively caresses the literary object with a sort of refined intellectual voluptuousness. (Discussing Pierre Loti's novel Aziyadé, Barthes savors "the sensuous, plump palatization of the y" in the title.) This uncanny sensitivity, along with his formidable analytical skills, makes Bartles an illuminating guide to things like Chateaubriand's Life of Rancé or the use of names in Proust. Still, what Barthes actually does with literature often seems irrelevant or downright destructive—less concerned with the text than with weaving interpretations around it. Aziyadé, he says, is an insipid novel—but the disjunction separating Julien Viaud (the author, a naval officer and world traveler), Pierre Loti (his pseudonym and literary self), and a second Loti (protagonist of the story) creates all kinds of opportunities for Structuralist gymnastics. This indifference to content in the traditional sense reminds one of nihilism, and in fact at one point Barthes observes that in literature, as in life, "there is ultimately nothing to understand." But still worse is Barthes' penchant for oracular utterances, often obscure (what is "a nascent schizophrenia, prudently formed in a homeopathic quantity"?) and always dogmatic ("antithesis is. . . a mechanism quite devoid of meaning"). This can lead, at best, to a string of thought-provoking dicta, but in any case it fails to leave the reader with a coherent view of the work in question.

Pub Date: July 1, 1980

ISBN: 0810126419

Page Count: 136

Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1980

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TO THE ONE I LOVE THE BEST

EPISODES FROM THE LIFE OF LADY MENDL (ELSIE DE WOLFE)

An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.

Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955

ISBN: 0670717797

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955

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IN MY PLACE

From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992

ISBN: 0-374-17563-2

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992

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