New Critical Essays arrives to remind us, as if valediction, what a consummate literary critic Barthes could be. Ingenious, rigorous, epigrammatic, and genial, his essays on classic French texts are as stratling and as fresh as any reconsideration since Hulme, Pound, and Eliot gave European literature their once-over. New Critical Essays serves to remind us what a book can be—elegant and simple in production, serious and delightful in content, a binding-together of reflections we have learned to call 'ludic, ' a demonstration of the mind's play and a reexcitation of our joy in the world.' —John Updike, The New Yorker His mind was as interestingly active as ever, and he remained beyond compara as the subtlest, most original, most sympathetic literary intelligence of the age, an extraordinary source of new ideas about the nature and practice of literature. — John Sturrock, The New York Times Book Review Roland Barthes was born in 1915 and studied French literature and classic at the University of Paris. After teaching French at universities in Rumania and Egypt, he joined the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, where he devoted himself to research in sociology and lexicology. He was a professor at the Collège de France until his death in 1980.