ROLAND > BARTHES Sade Fou LoyolaPHILOSOPHY / LITERATURE "[Sade/Fourier/Loyola] may be the best introduction to Barthes's work now in English."—John Updike, The New Yorker “Barthes's writing is so clear and bracing that he manages to avoid the preciosity of which some of his English imitators are more than capable. . . . Sade, Fourier, Loyola traces the work of the title's three ‘founders of language'—not those mythical Amazonians who uttered sounds and found themselves harmonious, but three despised and excessive votaries of the written word who liberate language from its solid referential powers by isolating it, by revealing it, by taking pleasure in it. . . A witty and colourful book."—Peter Ackroyd, Spectator "What are these three more than a little mad, amateurish authors doing as the subject of a book by Roland Barthes? The short answer is that they are proving his point (and proving it rather well) that if we forget for a moment the vast and emotive matters they were writing about, and attend instead to the form their writings take, all three are strangely alike. . . . [Barthes] has put the saint together with the sinner, and both with the anarchist Fourier, the better to display the provocative neutrality of the structuralist, who can take the same tools, to the same good effect, to all three of them." —John Sturrock, New Statesman Roland Barthes (1915-1980) studied French literature and classics at the University of Paris. After teaching French at universities in Rumania and Egypt, he did research in sociology and lexicology at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique and taught sociology at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris. He was a professor at the College de France until his death. Cover design by Charles Skaggs UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS BERKELEY 94720 ISBN 0-S20-Obb28-bALSO BY ROLAND BARTHES On Racine Writing Degree Zero Elements of Semiology Mythologies SIZ The Pleasure of the Text