Image Music Text by Roland Barthes

ESSAYS SELECTED AND TRANSLATED BY STEPHEN HEATH

’Image-Music-Text’ brings together major essays by Roland Barthes on the structural analysis of narrative and on issues in literary theory, on the semiotics of photograph and film, on the practice of music and voice.

Throughout the volume runs a constant movement ’from work to text’: an attention to the very ‘grain’ of signifying activity and the desire to follow – in literature, image, film, song and theatre – whatever turns, displaces, shifts, disperses.

Stephen Heath, whose translation has been described as “skilful and readable” (TLS) and “quite brilliant” (TES), is the author of ’Vertige du déplacement’, a study of Barthes. His selection of essays, each important in its own right, also serves as “the best…introduction so far to Barthes’ career as the slayer of contemporary myths” (JOHN STURROCK, ’New Statesman).’