{"product_id":"2026200015140-secondhand-critical-essays","title":"Critical Essays","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eCondition remarks:\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBook: Good\u003cbr\u003eJacket: No dust jacket - some marks on spine and corners\u003cbr\u003ePages: Good\u003cbr\u003eCondition remarks: Condition as shown in image\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOne of the twentieth century's most electrifying intellectual voices, Roland Barthes dismantles the boundaries between literature, culture, and semiology in Critical Essays, a landmark collection that reshaped how the Western world reads and thinks about texts. First published in French as Essais Critiques in 1964 and translated into English by Richard Howard, this volume gathers Barthes's incisive commentaries on writers and thinkers ranging from Brecht and Robbe-Grillet to Michelet and Voltaire, presenting a dazzling panorama of mid-century French intellectual life. Each piece functions as both a rigorous argument and a stylistic performance, illustrating Barthes's conviction that criticism is itself a form of writing — never neutral, always implicated in the ideologies it seeks to illuminate.\n\nBarthes argues throughout this collection that the act of reading is inseparable from the structures of power and meaning embedded in language itself, a thesis that would become foundational to structuralist and post-structuralist literary theory. His prose moves with rare precision and elegance, deploying close analysis with the confidence of a thinker who has fundamentally reimagined what criticism can do. Critical Essays remains an essential text for students of literature, philosophy, and cultural studies — and for any reader willing to question everything they thought they knew about the written word.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Secondhand Stock","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49203188203739,"sku":"2026200015140-SECONDHAND","price":15.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0523\/7646\/9701\/files\/ce9a791b-fa0f-4494-a628-e6e6726a48db.png?v=1788145298","url":"https:\/\/bookgrocer.com\/products\/2026200015140-secondhand-critical-essays","provider":"Book Grocer","version":"1.0","type":"link"}