#KateBriggs24 Weeks 12 & 13
This Little Art, p. 252-309; Sessions of Feb. 16 & 23, 1980; Proust and Photography
Hello everyone! We are nearing the end of the lectures in The Preparation of the Novel, which makes me sad, and we are well into the second half of This Little Art, which also makes me a little sad. I don’t really want the books to end, although, of course, I can always begin them again. Books never need to end.
As we think about endings, Kim and I are planning a video call in early May as a wrap-up conversation for the first half of the year. More details on that call next time. And more details on what comes next soon after that…
I hope your reading — whatever it is — is going well! Share some thoughts?
Here’s Rachel Malik’s collection of Roland Barthes books, posted in honor of the anniversary of his death on March 26th, 1980.
Schedule
Here’s our schedule for Week 12:
And here’s the schedule for Week 13:
Resources and Links
On p. 290, Briggs mentions a panel discussion on translating Kafka, which you can watch here.
Kim provided a source of information on the term “Idiorrhythmy.”
Check out Kim’s newly-updated #KateBriggs24 website.
From Anna Amundsen, here’s an additional reading suggestion:
Discussion
From Slnieckar on Bluesky:
Readers love the “immobile heap” quotation:
Anindita also finding Barthes relatable:
From Kim:
From Catherine:
From Isabella (replies here). This is a passage from Briggs that resonated with a lot of people:
Finally, a photo from Adam:
"How we say each other's names out loud is how we position ourselves, publicly, in relation to each other, to other people, to languages, to cultures, to knowledge, and to power - consciously as well as inadvertently."
Thank you all for your company and your comments!
Rebecca and Kim
I really love the pages where Briggs compares translations and tables, or to translate and to table. I love unlikely comparisons that we somehow make work anyway! It's such a fun, creative exercise to do this kind of comparison -- I just did an exercise like this with my students in class, and they seemed to like it.
And then her closing sentence on p. 309 is so good -- I really appreciate the long sentence with the many "because" clauses that sum up the main points she's made in this section. It's an elegant way to conclude.
I'm also fascinated by the other edition of Preparation that is so different from the one Briggs translated, since it's based on the audio recordings instead of the lecture notes. How many versions of these lectures there are!
Barthes keeps on surprising me (and pleasing me deeply) with his... for lack of a better term... real-world-ness. This is my first experience with his work, and I think even well into TPotN I'm still somehow expecting it to be super abstract, removed from daily life. Sometimes it is rather abstract (not a problem) and sometimes, often, it's just so... real, relevant, immediate, and daily. Right now I'm thinking especially of the first few pages of the Feb. 16 session, in which RB discusses the separation (painful, complicated, maybe necessary?) between the writer and the world, the different forms this can take. On page 276, he writes of "... the burning timeliness of what I'm doing (Writing) and what's going on the in the world around me, neither sphere is really contemporaneous with the other..." I always feel like such a slow writer—both in the sense that it literally takes me what seems like a very long time to make poems, and also because the "what" of what I write about is almost always removed in time (I can't write about the present or even the recent past, it's much too close). I often feel a strong desire to just retreat into reading and writing, away from "the world," and then feel guilty and ashamed about that desire. Definitely I experience my own version of the separation RB writes about, and like so many other lectures in TPotN, this one makes me feel less alone.
Plus I love the way he capitalizes Writing.