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A Lover's Discourse: Fragments
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Manufacturer: Hill and Wang
Author: Roland Barthes
Publisher: Hill and Wang
Average Customer Rating:
Our Price: $11.20
You Save: $ 2.80 ( 20% )
Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Hill and Wang
Author: Roland Barthes
Publisher: Hill and Wang
Average Customer Rating:
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A Lover's Discourse: Fragments Description
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 440.81
EAN: 9780374521615
ISBN: 0374521611
Label: Hill and Wang
Manufacturer: Hill and Wang
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 224
Publication Date: 1979-06-01
Publisher: Hill and Wang
Studio: Hill and Wang
Dewey Decimal Number: 440.81
EAN: 9780374521615
ISBN: 0374521611
Label: Hill and Wang
Manufacturer: Hill and Wang
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 224
Publication Date: 1979-06-01
Publisher: Hill and Wang
Studio: Hill and Wang
Editorial Review of A Lover's Discourse: Fragments
"Barthes's most popular and unusual performance as a writer is A Lover's Discourse, a writing out of the discourse of love. This language—primarily the complaints and reflections of the lover when alone, not exchanges of a lover with his or her partner—is unfashionable. Thought it is spoken by millions of people, diffused in our popular romances and television programs as well as in serious literature, there is no institution that explores, maintains, modifies, judges, repeats, and otherwise assumes responsibility for this discourse . . . Writing out the figures of a neglected discourse, Barthes surprises us in A Lover's Discourse by making love, in its most absurd and sentimental forms, an object of interest."—Jonathan Culler
Customer Reviews of A Lover's Discourse: Fragments
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Dissecting the broken heart...
Review:
What is love? Perhaps the question has never been answered more succinctly, more completely, and more devastatingly than in *A Lover's Discourse.* In this unique and sly little book, Roland Barthes deconstructs `love,' or, perhaps more accurately, subjects it to a thorough semiotic examination that reveals the psycholinguistic archetypes that comprise all great affairs of the heart--the very definition of which virtually dictates that they all end unhappily.
Barthes examines love in brief chapters, each devoted to a different aspect of the entire humiliating `catastrophe': the helpless infatuation, the agonizing wait beside the telephone that doesn't ring, the jealousy of anyone with access to the beloved, the infantile terror of abandonment, the sense of martyrdom, the suicidal despair...but also the inexplicable enchantment of the seemingly insignificant ((and yet all-too potent)) detail that fatally charms us--the crooked tooth, the dimple, the slant of an eye, the simplest gesture--that causes that one person of all possible people to appear to us as the very image of our desire no matter what suffering they subsequently bring upon us. And they do cause us to suffer, because the lover always loves the beloved more than he or she is loved in return.
It's hard to say whether this book helps to heal a broken heart or turns a stick in it--probably it does a little of both. One thing is certain: this is no *30 Days to Mend a Broken Heart* or such similar self-help collection of insipid platitudes. This is more like chemotherapy. To paraphrase the old joke, Barthes might have cured Cupid of his disease, but, unfortunately, the patient died. If nothing else, *A Lover's Discourse* vividly understands, like even the best of your friends do not, what you are going through when your heart is broken. What Barthes does that is so unique here is to put into words, with an almost scientific detachment and exactitude, the total emotional chaos of an experience that is beyond the power of one in the throes of it to express coherently. `Yes, that's it exactly,' the lover mutters, recognizing himself in these pages, `that's *exactly* how I feel.' Some aspects of love are simply too embarrassing to share with anyone--Barthes doesn't turn away from a single one of them. There's no modesty here: the heart is laid open. This is radical surgery.
One undeniably prescriptive advantage of this text is that it pinpoints with sobering exactitude the way one was *not* loved by the beloved. You no longer need doubt yourself, to be left on the hook forever questioning: `Did she love me/did she love me not?' At the same time you recognize yourself in Barthes' description of love and say `Yes, I loved her just like that' you also recognize your beloved, or more accurately, the absence of your beloved, and can finally assert without further doubt "Yes, that is precisely how she *did not* love me.'
An extraordinary work by an extraordinary intellect about an ordinary experience that leaves everyone stupefied, *A Lover's Discourse* comes as close as its likely to be possible to lucidly describing the indescribable. Is it a cure for a broken heart? Perhaps. If love is a disease that one is cured of simply by knowing the symptoms--an illusion whose power to charm is greatly reduced once you discover the magician's tricks. The magician, of course, being you.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: I tried, I really did, but I just couldn't READ this
Review: Here me out: maybe it is b/c of the book I just finished (the 3rd policeman) that made me edgy for a little more cohesiveness - a novel if you will. This book is all in the title: FRAGMENTS. Its a uniquely presented book that discusses verbs and actions that we find in 'love'. From what I did manage to read, it was an eye opener, but I just couldn't get past the way it was presented. He took several famous authors and took from their works and his life experience and manifested these chapters on the chosen word (chpt one is 'engulf'). I felt like I was reading a REFERENCE book for a poetry class. Good luck!
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: makes you wonder about Love complicated issues
Review: I LOVE this book - it made me reflect deeply about love - what is and what it involves. There are sad statements with it but there are also some parts that make you smile!
Love complicates things and suffering is a great part of it as most of us either know already or will eventually (hopefully!)
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Words Misunderstood
Review: Barthes's fascination with Structuralism is abundant in this examination of the terms that could perhaps summarize the incomplete thoughts of an anxious lover. He asserts that the thoughts and words of a lover remain suspended-- they show themselves as thin representations of the truth that lurks in the the lover. Sentences trail off, remain unfulfilled, and are swallowed by frustration. Reading this, it is easy to say, "No kidding! I'm so glad that someone could put this into words!" And that is the torture of his paradox. The words are weak-- the thesaurus will forever be incomplete. The text is a work of metafiction, if ever there were one. Easy to read; yet compelling, Barthes is the essence of the bittersweet.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: His best book ?
Review: A personal favourite. Captures admirably the absurdity of it all. Contains gems like `Even as he obsessively asks himself why he is not loved, the amorous subject lives in the belief that the loved object does love him but does not tell him so.' Also has what is probably the best paragraph ever written on jealousy: `As a jealous man, I suffer four times over: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being so, because I fear my jealousy will wound the other, because I allow myself to be subject to a banality: I suffer from being excluded, from being aggressive, from being crazy and from being common.'
Review Summary: Dissecting the broken heart...
Review:
What is love? Perhaps the question has never been answered more succinctly, more completely, and more devastatingly than in *A Lover's Discourse.* In this unique and sly little book, Roland Barthes deconstructs `love,' or, perhaps more accurately, subjects it to a thorough semiotic examination that reveals the psycholinguistic archetypes that comprise all great affairs of the heart--the very definition of which virtually dictates that they all end unhappily.
Barthes examines love in brief chapters, each devoted to a different aspect of the entire humiliating `catastrophe': the helpless infatuation, the agonizing wait beside the telephone that doesn't ring, the jealousy of anyone with access to the beloved, the infantile terror of abandonment, the sense of martyrdom, the suicidal despair...but also the inexplicable enchantment of the seemingly insignificant ((and yet all-too potent)) detail that fatally charms us--the crooked tooth, the dimple, the slant of an eye, the simplest gesture--that causes that one person of all possible people to appear to us as the very image of our desire no matter what suffering they subsequently bring upon us. And they do cause us to suffer, because the lover always loves the beloved more than he or she is loved in return.
It's hard to say whether this book helps to heal a broken heart or turns a stick in it--probably it does a little of both. One thing is certain: this is no *30 Days to Mend a Broken Heart* or such similar self-help collection of insipid platitudes. This is more like chemotherapy. To paraphrase the old joke, Barthes might have cured Cupid of his disease, but, unfortunately, the patient died. If nothing else, *A Lover's Discourse* vividly understands, like even the best of your friends do not, what you are going through when your heart is broken. What Barthes does that is so unique here is to put into words, with an almost scientific detachment and exactitude, the total emotional chaos of an experience that is beyond the power of one in the throes of it to express coherently. `Yes, that's it exactly,' the lover mutters, recognizing himself in these pages, `that's *exactly* how I feel.' Some aspects of love are simply too embarrassing to share with anyone--Barthes doesn't turn away from a single one of them. There's no modesty here: the heart is laid open. This is radical surgery.
One undeniably prescriptive advantage of this text is that it pinpoints with sobering exactitude the way one was *not* loved by the beloved. You no longer need doubt yourself, to be left on the hook forever questioning: `Did she love me/did she love me not?' At the same time you recognize yourself in Barthes' description of love and say `Yes, I loved her just like that' you also recognize your beloved, or more accurately, the absence of your beloved, and can finally assert without further doubt "Yes, that is precisely how she *did not* love me.'
An extraordinary work by an extraordinary intellect about an ordinary experience that leaves everyone stupefied, *A Lover's Discourse* comes as close as its likely to be possible to lucidly describing the indescribable. Is it a cure for a broken heart? Perhaps. If love is a disease that one is cured of simply by knowing the symptoms--an illusion whose power to charm is greatly reduced once you discover the magician's tricks. The magician, of course, being you.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: I tried, I really did, but I just couldn't READ this
Review: Here me out: maybe it is b/c of the book I just finished (the 3rd policeman) that made me edgy for a little more cohesiveness - a novel if you will. This book is all in the title: FRAGMENTS. Its a uniquely presented book that discusses verbs and actions that we find in 'love'. From what I did manage to read, it was an eye opener, but I just couldn't get past the way it was presented. He took several famous authors and took from their works and his life experience and manifested these chapters on the chosen word (chpt one is 'engulf'). I felt like I was reading a REFERENCE book for a poetry class. Good luck!
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: makes you wonder about Love complicated issues
Review: I LOVE this book - it made me reflect deeply about love - what is and what it involves. There are sad statements with it but there are also some parts that make you smile!
Love complicates things and suffering is a great part of it as most of us either know already or will eventually (hopefully!)
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Words Misunderstood
Review: Barthes's fascination with Structuralism is abundant in this examination of the terms that could perhaps summarize the incomplete thoughts of an anxious lover. He asserts that the thoughts and words of a lover remain suspended-- they show themselves as thin representations of the truth that lurks in the the lover. Sentences trail off, remain unfulfilled, and are swallowed by frustration. Reading this, it is easy to say, "No kidding! I'm so glad that someone could put this into words!" And that is the torture of his paradox. The words are weak-- the thesaurus will forever be incomplete. The text is a work of metafiction, if ever there were one. Easy to read; yet compelling, Barthes is the essence of the bittersweet.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: His best book ?
Review: A personal favourite. Captures admirably the absurdity of it all. Contains gems like `Even as he obsessively asks himself why he is not loved, the amorous subject lives in the belief that the loved object does love him but does not tell him so.' Also has what is probably the best paragraph ever written on jealousy: `As a jealous man, I suffer four times over: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being so, because I fear my jealousy will wound the other, because I allow myself to be subject to a banality: I suffer from being excluded, from being aggressive, from being crazy and from being common.'