Rushworth, J; (2021) Barthes and mouvance. Exemplaria , 33 (3) pp. 312-326. 10.1080/10412573.2021.1977523.

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Abstract

In this article I consider, through the example of mouvance, both Roland Barthes’s engagement with medieval culture and the contribution that medievalists can make to Barthes studies. The term mouvance was proposed by Paul Zumthor to account for textual instability in a pre-print age of often anonymous texts. Barthes uses Zumthor’s term twice, in a lecture from Comment vivre ensemble (How to Live Together) given on February 2, 1977. Focusing on these occurrences, I show how Barthesian mouvance shares with Zumthor’s definition an emphasis on instability, while also acting as a gloss on one of Barthes’s own terms: idiorrythmie (idiorrhythmy). Barthes’s use of the term mouvance is one striking example of his own engagement with contemporary medieval scholarship. Yet I also argue that mouvance, for Barthes, is a matter of form as much as content. Accordingly, I suggest that medievalists, and the notion of mouvance, can help respond to editorial challenges surrounding Barthes’s work, especially in the case of posthumously published texts with oral origins that exist in several different versions.

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