That is to say, it’s a good thing we still have Barthes to help us understand what’s always at risk of happening to writers like Barthes.Ī new, unabridged edition of “Mythologies,” translated by Richard Howard and Annette Lavers, provides additional antidotes to another stereotype about so-called French theorists. An interest in the writing of a gay professor of rhetoric, born to a protestant family on France’s Atlantic seaboard, ought not to be conflated with a taste for Provençal cooking neither should the lure of French theory be assimilated to the grand tourist’s reverence for the mysteries of Notre Dame or Chartres. Anyone who reads Barthes on the myth of steak frites, or the recipes in nineteen-fifties Elle magazines-“A peasant dish is admitted only on occasion as the rustic whim of blasé city folk”-will immediately understand that the American professor is one more dupe of a consumer mentality that leads us to haplessly confuse our gastronomic, religious, and intellectual experiences of other cultures.
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