Roland Barthes remains one of the most influential cultural theorists of the postwar period and Image-Music-Text collects his most influential essays. Ed White provides students with a clear guide to this essential but difficult text. As students are increasingly expected to write across a range of media, Barthes' work can be understood as an early mapping of what we now call interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary study. The book's detailed section-by-section readings makes Barthes' most important writings accessible to undergraduate readers. This book is a perfect companion for teaching and learning Barthes' ideas in cultural studies and literary theory. 'Using clear examples of explicate Barthes's concerns, this volume is a triumph of exposition and illustration, be it in narrative analysis, visual theory, cultural studies, or textual essayism. By taking the essays in Image-Music-Text in the non-chronological order given to them by Stephen Heath, the volume even attempts, tentatively, provisionally, a synthesis.' - Andy Stafford, Senior Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies, University of Leeds Ed White is Associate Professor in the Department of English, University of Florida at Gainesville. He is the author of The Backcountry and the City: Colonization and Conflict in Early America (2005) and co-editor of Beyond Douglass: New Perspectives on Early African American Literature (2008). How to Read Barthes' Image-Music-Text By Ed White Pluto Press Copyright © 2012 Ed White All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-7453-2957-4 Contents Introduction, 1, 1. The Photographic Message, 13, 2. Rhetoric of the Image, 25, 3. The Third Meaning, 38, 4. Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein, 53, 5. Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative, 65, 6 The Struggle with the Angel, 100, 7. The Death of the Author, 111, 8. Musica Practica, 122, 9. From Work to Text, 129, 10. Change the Object Itself, 139, 11. Lesson in Writing, 145, 12. The Grain of the Voice, 151, 13. Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers, 159, Reading Across Barthes' Work, 192, Index, 195, CHAPTER 1 The Photographic Message This essay, the earliest included in Image-Music-Text, seems to take as its primary concern the isolation and characterization of the photograph — specifically the press photograph — as a unique medium for communication. Barthes had earlier analyzed many photographic images — glamour shots of Greta Garbo and Audrey Hepburn, for example, or the Paris-Match cover — but here he treats the press shot specifically as an image, and specifically the kind of image created by a camera. The photograph as a unique technological medium was a subject of interest to Barthes throughout his career — he included personal photographs in his autobiography, Roland Barthes, and one of his last books, Camera Lucida, explores the photograph and what it means. But as Barthes will eventually indicate, his project is more profound: he wants to address the problem of how — or if — we can perceive and access the objective reality of the world around us. Hence his choice of the press photograph, rather than, say, the artistic photograph or (the focus of the next essay) the advertisement photograph: the press photograph, Barthes insists, seems unique among forms of communication, and accentuates a particular theoretical problem unique to photographic technology. Barthes begins, characteristically, by clearing the field of related but nonetheless distinct questions. The first paragraph raises the complex system of "emission," "transmission," and "reception" for any press photograph (15). In assessing the press photograph, one would presumably consider the staff of the newspaper (the photographer herself, the technicians in the lay-out department, the editors, and so on), the demographics of the particular newspaper (the class background and political affiliation of its readers, for example). These matters of emission and reception, however, belong to a separate field of study — the sociological analysis of a mass medium — distinct from the problem of "the message itself" (15). Even after we understand the workings of the newspaper, the fact remains that the press photograph "is not simply a product or a channel but also an object endowed with a structural autonomy " (15, emphasis added). Consequently, our analysis needs to be suited to its "unique structure," and should be able to distinguish analytically those other sociological elements (16). Barthes reiterates this point in talking about the photograph's transmission, which will always involve an accompanying text — the caption or title, the accompanying article. Yes, this textual material and the photographic image "are co-operative," and work in tandem, but nonetheless, they are different kinds of messages. We must carefully distinguish these types of messages for a number of reasons. For one thing, we already have some understanding of how written lang