The Rustle of Language

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by Roland Barthes,

Translated by Richard Howard

University of California Press

Due/Published January 1989, pages, paper

ISBN 0520066294

Reissued

"The Rustle of Language is a collection of forty-five essays, written between 1967 and 1980, on language, literature, and teaching--the pleasure of the text--in an authoritative translation by Richard Howard.

"Barthes' career was an exemplary search for understanding how man creates meaning, a lifelong exploration of man's definition as homo significans, the maker of meaning in signs. In anthropology, in linguistics, philosophy, and the discourse upon literature, this has been a characteristic preoccupation of our age, and no one addressed himself to it so persistently, so multifariously, so ingeniously, as Barthes."--Peter Brooks, The New Republic

"In The Rustle of Language, the typically Barthesian texture of the writing makes itself felt. That texture--delightful to many of us--is composed of the mutual jostling of many (often mutually incompatible) registers of discourse. Linguistics, literature, philosophy, . . . history, semantics, Marxism‹these are only the commonest of the many categories that organize Barthes' thinking. . . . In all of these essays, the briskness and liveliness of Barthes's style makes the work interesting."--Helen Vendler, New York Review of Books