People tend to divide noted libertarian Robert A. Heinlein's career into three different eras, with the "juveniles," the "slick" science fiction stories, and the bigger, more opinionated novels, but over in Locus Magazine, Gary Westfahl has a theory that's sure to be controversial: Heinlein's career actually divides into a slew of serious novels, followed by a swerve into satire. {Via I09} [more inside]
posted by Mezentian on Nov 26, 2012 - 96 comments

But like many an inarticulate young lover, I thought for a time that seduction was a matter of giving the right book to the right woman. In my case it was Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse: a meditation on Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther that catalogues the melancholic lover’s prized ‘image repertoire’ – the scene of waiting, the feeling of being dissolved in the presence of the loved being, the attraction of suicide – and thinly veils the author’s own life as a middle-aged gay man in Paris in the 1970s. This gift was always a prelude to disaster.

– RB and Me: An Education is an essay by Brian G. Dillon about his relationship with the books of French philosopher Roland Barthes. It's also a lovely autobiography of an awkward boy finding his place in life. Dillon's website collects his essays, and is trove of interesting insight. Besides writing essays and fiction, Dillon is also the UK editor of Cabinet Magazine, and you can read a fair number of his articles online, including ones on Beau Brummel and the cravat, hypochondria and hydrotherapy.
posted by Kattullus on Dec 1, 2011 - 4 comments

On not reading books. Franco Moretti, author of the controversial Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History, proposes that literary study needs to abandon "close reading" for "distant reading": "understanding literature not by studying particular texts, but by aggregating and analyzing massive amounts of data." He is co-founder of the Stanford Literary Lab, where he and like-minded colleagues have published studies on programming computers to use statistical analysis to identify a novel's genre(PDF) and analyzing plots as networks(PDF). Similar projects are on the way.
posted by Saxon Kane on Jun 26, 2011 - 53 comments

For Roland Barthes, the Death of the Author came on March 23, 1980, in the form of a car speeding down the Rue des Écoles (perhaps that car has become, like wrestling or detergent, another myth); though the Author is gone, his works--texts--remain; they are about history, about fashion, about love, about chopsticks, but fundamentally, they are about signs--as Barthes, once interviewed, said, "Each of us speaks but a single sentence, which only death can bring to a close"--rapidly approaching the end of his sentence, Barthes thought about living together, but the period would be found on his tombstone: écrivain. [more inside]
posted by nasreddin on Aug 27, 2007 - 19 comments

"The theories and opinions of the German philosopher Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (1903-1969) on popular music and the culture industry are still highly influential in the domain of media studies. His thoughts about these subjects were very critical, pessimistic even. Adorno analysed the workings of the culture industry in terms of 'standardization' and used the concept of 'pseudo-individualization' to describe its effects on the listeners.
posted by j-urb on May 30, 2006 - 14 comments

Graphs, Maps, Trees. The Valve is hosting a literary event for professor Franco Moretti's new book, Graphs, Maps, Trees. Moretti aims to reinvigorate literary studies by constructing abstract models based upon quantitative history, geography, and evolutionary theory. PDFs of the original articles: Graphs, Maps, Trees. A review at n+1 is here.
posted by painquale on Jan 13, 2006 - 10 comments