Roland Barthes's Party

The Roland Barthes Reading Group is Emma Bolland, Julia Calver, Daniela Cascella, Helen Clarke, Louise Finney, Susannah Gent, Sharon Kivland, Debbie Michaels, Hestia Peppe, Rachel Smith. For four years we have been reading The Preparation of the Novel by Roland Barthes, the collection of the series of lectures he gave at the College de France between 1978 and 1980, completed shortly before his death in 1981. He declared his intention to write a novel, and in this pedagogical experiment, explores the trial of novel writing. In this book the authors riff on a tiny remark Barthes makes: a. Example (from personal experience) –> I want to narrate a party: as a rule, anecdotal material: people I’d not met before, particular characters, conversations, rituals, etc. But when I set about telling the story, I find myself weighed down by the ‘necessary’ details (necessary for the logic of the narrative) that I personally find it too tiresome to recount. I only need ‘retain’ two notations fr...