The theme of this month’s reading has been reading above my weight class. I went to mediocre schools my entire life, from growing up in small town Virginia to attending a swindling art college in San Francisco. My intellectual development has happened almost entirely outside of academic institutions, just me following whatever I’m interested in at the moment to the point of mania.
Can't remember if I said this to you already, but Jonathan Culler's book on Barthes in the Oxford Very Short Introduction series is great. V helpful in tracking the shifts in RB's thinking. He was sort of a Dylan/Miles Davis type in that regard. At the point of WRITING DEGREE ZERO, IIRC, he is in thrall to structuralism, and hating the influence of Sartre.
Funnily enough I've been going through the same process of realizing my true passion. It's just a shame, as you said, I didn't discover it 10 or 15 years ago. In retrospect it was blindingly obvious. There wasn't a time, except perhaps a year or two of burnout during college and university, where I didn't have a book close to hand. Having said that, the younger me would probably not believe I would be buying essay collections, or books about readers and books etc. I do wonder how different my life would be had I done something like English Literature at university level. As it is, like you, I'm trying to build towards that in my own way.
Can't remember if I said this to you already, but Jonathan Culler's book on Barthes in the Oxford Very Short Introduction series is great. V helpful in tracking the shifts in RB's thinking. He was sort of a Dylan/Miles Davis type in that regard. At the point of WRITING DEGREE ZERO, IIRC, he is in thrall to structuralism, and hating the influence of Sartre.
Funnily enough I've been going through the same process of realizing my true passion. It's just a shame, as you said, I didn't discover it 10 or 15 years ago. In retrospect it was blindingly obvious. There wasn't a time, except perhaps a year or two of burnout during college and university, where I didn't have a book close to hand. Having said that, the younger me would probably not believe I would be buying essay collections, or books about readers and books etc. I do wonder how different my life would be had I done something like English Literature at university level. As it is, like you, I'm trying to build towards that in my own way.