Image-Music-Text

Roland Barthes is a great writer, the various essays are concise, technical but without leaving the less technical reader lost. There is actually a lot to enjoy and I find as an artist Barthes insights inspire me to think about images in new ways while also giving insight into other arts like music and text. I would like to read more by Barthes in the future.

Like so much of this author's work, I profit from it although I don't accept his premises. The writing is very hifalutin and abstract. It's not easy to figure out his meaning with all the abstract terms. Still he makes some great points. He uses a term - censorship through repletion - that I have never encountered elsewhere. I understand this to mean that there is so much worthless discourse that information has no audience. I find this an apt term for present US media. Our world is falling apart and the news is about Game of Thrones. The sea is rising and we worry about whether a favorite TV show will be canceled or which new toy is better, the a-phone or the b-phone. I prefer reading old books to new. Somehow Barthes seems like an old-timer in this equation. He's part of the tradition of making real points although he's not that ancient.

Image Music and Text is a classic on text linguistics and should be in the library of every musician, writer, and linguist.

i bought this book as part of classic textbooks in semiotics studies. thin book, but basic ideas of semiotics, linguistics, and literature critique theories, by barthes.

Barthes manner of explanation is personal and didactic - he was dedicated to the essay form and I enjoy returning to each of them.

nice book.. thanks!

Its excellent, i love it, but try interpreting this in the practical middle brow range of actually doing something with it. Thats not a complain, thats an open ended challenge -- as I've been conjuring with little success for a couple of years: all thoughts welcome!

This book is phenomenal. It analyzes aspects of human knowledge that one never thought possible. I recommend reading Foucault's "The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language" first. It will set the basis for what Barthes just dives into. Awesome analysis.