The community of writing: Susan Sontag, Leyla Perrone-Moisés, Beatriz Sarlo and Roland Barthes

Abstract

This article aims to present and compare the readings of Roland Barthes by three critics: Susan Sontag in the United States, Leyla Perrone-Moisés in Brazil, and Beatriz Sarlo in Argentina. To this end, we begin with some observations on the international circulation of literary criticism and then offer an overview of each critic’s engagement with Barthes, highlighting the texts they wrote shortly after his death in 1980: Sontag’s “Remembering Barthes”, Perrone-Moisés’s “Remembering Barthes, Without Academic Autopsies”, and Sarlo’s “Roland Barthes: An Impossible Biography”. Finally, we discuss the impact of these readings on Barthes’s own work, drawing on research in his archive at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.