Reviews for Early Modern English Dialogues: Spoken Interaction as Writing

The average rating for Early Modern English Dialogues: Spoken Interaction as Writing based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-11-13 00:00:00 Sheri Harris This should have got three stars as a bog standard basic introduction to the semiologist, Roland Barthes, but the graphics really do let it down and graphics are an essential element in this series which sells itself on using imagery to help get across complex ideas. The fact that Barthes was a sort of philosopher not only of language but of images makes this weakness doubly embarrassing. And why is it so poor - other than looking as if it were little more than scribbles on a page? Because of a strange obsession with penises and sex that the artist, Ann Course, seems to have. There is a natural point where sex comes into play but the interest here seems unnecessarily obsessive - not only in the insistence of five pages devoted to illustrating De Sade's range of perversity and the images of the homosexual Barthes buggering people but the repeated motif of willies on nearly every page in the first half, not a few of them clearly erect if clothed. Fine, nothing wrong with willies but the pictures and a strange leitmotif of a robot like creature with eyes on stalks add absolutely nothing to the argument. The textual argument itself is fine as far as it goes (it is basically an hour's lecture) - though clearly Philip Thody isn't entirely convinced by his own subject, something which becomes fairly clear by the end. The truth is that Barthes is a bit of a one-trick pony, fashionable in his day, but a foot note in intellectual history. Perhaps he will always have to be read by anyone curious about the shenanigans of the post-war French Left Bank and, yes, he adds his bit to the general sense of cynical libertarianism that was part of the culture of the Generation of 68 but, no, he does not really say anything that others have not said better. The flaw in post-structuralism is the obvious one - the great, 'so what?' that it inspires. We are living in a world of codes and significations - so what? Humans need narrative and codes and significations to create narrative - so what? Do the post-structuralists posit truth? or just expose lies? And then it hits you - these people are just Gallic moralists with their visceral and unfair hatred of the 'bourgeois' and often silly (and soon dropped) adulation of the masses. There is no consideration of the human right to be self-deluded as a means of psychic survival in a dangerous world nor of the fact that the deluded and the aware are to be found in all walks of life regardless of their relationship to the means of production. Willing suspension of belief or, indeed, of disbelief is how we get along - observe the hysteria over Obama in recent weeks. And as for Barthes' 'obsession' - that we can be artistically moved by the non-existent. Again, so what? Diana's funeral is a great 'movement' of this sort and some lost themselves in the nonsense (which is their right) while others saw through it and chose to stay silent so as not to hurt the feelings of the insanely sentimental. But we did not need post-structuralists to tell us what was going on? We knew it or we chose subconsciously not to know it - that is what being human is all about. The knowers are not morally superior to the deluded - just different and with a rightful caution about what happens when the deluded capture the State and other forms of power over the undeluded. Fortunately one set of deluded usually dislikes the pretensions of the others enough to enable some degree of protection for those who can see the bones beneath the skin of society and culture. In the end, we are left with another case of intellectuals discovering the bleeding obvious and then packaging it for a career. The squabbles between intellectuals in France in the 1970s about Racine seem to be mere repetitions in style (though not in content) of those between Catholics and Jansenists and not much better than that between the monks whose fisticuffs in Jerusalem are reported today (November 9th, 2008) - futile grandstanding between egos and tribes. So much intellectual effort to so little purpose ...

Review # 2 was written on 2015-01-02 00:00:00 Billy Brown This somewhat odd little book - a cartoon introduction to the ideas and work of Barthes - served its purpose by (a) being relatively painless to read (though the assorted phalluses - or possibly phalli - which were sprinkled liberally through what seemed like an unnecessarily large number of the drawings got a bit tedious after a while) and (b) confirming what I had already suspected, that I can comfortably leave Monsieur Barthes to the academic set and get on with my reading, without feeling unduly guilty, or worrying that I will be leaving some rich vein of meaning untapped. Not to be too critical, but most of the points that were made in this book seemed to be either glaringly obvious to anyone with half a brain, or so weirdly peculiar that nobody in their right mind would waste time worrying about them. Perhaps if I smoked morre Gauloises, or were less gruntled, or just more generally alienated, I might have liked it more. As it was, it seemed to me to be more suited to the pseudo-intellectual set than to those who just read for the pleasure that reading brings. Not that there's anything wrong with zat, of course. I read it in Spanish, but doubt that I would have reacted any differently to an English version.