This article is an invited paper, subjected to open review by the Editors and/or the Editorial Board

This article has been published in: Ocula 17, One hundred and one years of Barthes (1915-2016)

author: Gianfranco Marrone (Dipartimento di Culture e Società, Università di Palermo (IT))

Towards a barthesian lexicon: first entries

language: italian

abstract: In the following essay Gianfranco Marrone presents two entries from a more comprehensive work on Barthes’ lexicon: Work/Text and Obvious/Obtuse. In the first entry Marrone follows the intellectual process that led to a conceptual revolution in semiotic and literary research when Barthes moved from the traditional definition of the ‘work’ to that of the ‘text’. According to Barthes, the ‘text’ is a regulative hypothesis and a strategic category; it helps to overcome the separation between disciplines; and presupposes a practice of writing in which theory and subject tend to coincide. Is this distinction a well-established definitive result of semiotic research which began with Barthes? Or has this trend been inverted with a return to a focus on the ‘work’ rather than the ‘text’? Further issues are investigated under the entry Obvious/Obtuse, a Barthesian opposition firmly established within semiotic and film studies. The question of whether this distinction was an ad hoc theory applied solely to the few frames of Ejzenštejn’s films, or whether it can be extended to other texts and phenomena of sense, is still entirely open to discussion.

citation information: Gianfranco Marrone, Verso un lessico barthesiano: prime voci, "Ocula", vol.17, n.17, January 2016. DOI: 10.12977/ocula54

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