Lovers' murmurs

Fragments d'un discours amoureux

"A Lover's Discourse" is a seminar Roland Barthes taught at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1975. This course analyzes the German literary giant Goethe's masterpiece, The Sorrows of Young Werther, and explores the myriad aspects of love with young students. In this book, Roland Barthes breaks down romantic love stories into various scenarios: jealousy, madness, confusion, anxiety, unsolvable problems, despair, unbearable longing, relapses, and suicidal thoughts...
This discussion class on love and romance focused not on the literary classics themselves, but on the ways in which lovers expressed themselves and their mumblings within them. Two years later, Barthes incorporated his own emotional trajectory and inner journey into this analysis, developing a new literary style. Published in 1977, it quickly became a Western phenomenon, translated into nearly thirty languages ​​and staged, becoming Roland Barthes' most widely circulated and best-known work.
The author of this book attempts a highly neurotic, "divergent" style of writing, blending speculative thought with direct demonstration, demonstrating a "zero-degree writing" of "scattered perspective." He extracts the colorful fragments of romantic experience, refracting them through the mirror of philosophical speculation to form a bewildering array of combinations. Using a corresponding literary style, he reveals that lovers' whispers are nothing more than a tangled web of feelings and thoughts, a tangled mess that is difficult to disentangle. Previous meticulous and eloquent "reflections" on love and love talk seem pedantic and superficial, precisely what structuralism aims to demonstrate.

2016-07-01

上海人民出版社

225

9787208139046