Roland Barthes Par Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes by himself. Hmm. First published in 1975, this is an odd work. A certain dislocating anxiety pervades the book when I read it for the first time at the University of Illinois. Or was it Stanford? I forget. Hard to read straight through as it’s so reflexive, self-referencial, etc. Self-aggrandizing? Definitely. In any case, it was destined to be part of the Ëcrivains de toujours series published in France, the “écrivain x par lui-même”where a post-humous (and fictive) autobiography is cobbled together through quotes by the author himself. One of the first in this series was Michelet par lui-même.

oops.. I linked.

Roland Barthes sans peine by accident. Let me fix that ASAP.

R. BARTHES, Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, Seuil, Paris, 1975.

Bauby, Le scaphandre et Le papillon / the butterfly and the diving bell

This is one of the most amazing of autobiographies … Written with one blinking eyelid. Bauby was paralyzed and had the locked-in syndrome. Learned to communicate somehow to his assistant with a morse-like system of blinking his eyelid to the number of a letter’s place in the alphabet.

This book communicates the preciousness of life. Bauby was a talented editor-in-chief at Elle magazine.

You can read the rest below. En Français.

Bauby, Le scaphandre et Le papillon / the butterfly and the diving bell

This is one of the most amazing of autobiographies … Written with one blinking eyelid. Bauby was paralyzed and had the locked-in syndrome. Learned to communicate somehow to his assistant with a morse-like system of blinking his eyelid to the number of a letter’s place in the alphabet.

This book communicates the preciousness of life. Bauby was a talented editor-in-chief at Elle magazine.

You can read the rest below. En Français.

Sartre, Les Mots. An autobiography

This book was first introduced to me by René Girard, as being one of the better autobiographies in the modern era. A bit unconventional, it treats Sartre’s first steps in literature as well as his childhood living with an overbearing grandfather.