Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse?
Roland BarthesRead
Death of the Father would deprive literature of many of its pleasures. If there is no longer a Father, why tell stories? Doesn't every narrative lead back to Oedipus? Isn't storytelling always a way of searching for one's origin, speaking one's conflicts with the Law, entering into the dialectic of tenderness and hatred?
Interpretation
What this quote means
The absence of a father's figure in literature reduces its richness and meaning.
Roland Barthes reflects on the importance of paternal figures in storytelling, suggesting that narratives often explore themes of origin, authority, and emotional complexity tied to family dynamics. He hints that without paternal influence, the drive to tell stories and confront one's internal conflicts diminishes, thereby altering the essence of literature itself.
Themes
LiteratureStorytellingFatherOriginNarrative
In practice
Example use cases
During a lecture on the role of family in literature, you could quote Barthes to emphasize the importance of paternal relationships in storytelling.
More from Roland Barthes
All quotes →If I acknowledge my dependency, I do so because for me it is a means of signifying my demand: in the realm of love, futility is not a "weakness" or an "absurdity": it is a strong sign: the more futile, the more it signifies and the more it asserts itself as strength.)
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The gesture of the amorous embrace seems to fulfill, for a time, the subject's dream of total union with the loved being: The longing for consummation with the other.
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The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.
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I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.
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All those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death.
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