پیام بابایی

This paper examines Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot by the five semiotic codes of the French literary critic Roland Barthes introduced in his renowned work S/Z, to show that the novel is a ‘writerly’ rather than a ‘readerly’ text. The paper defines what Barthes means by the text of the writerly and then attempts to see if the selected novel yields to this sort of interpretation. Since the novel has been categorized as both modernist and postmodernist by prominent literary critics, it can be a proper case to be examined as a writerly text. The paper shows that the codes of semantic, symbolic and cultural which produce the writerly text are at work in this novel whereas the codes of the hermeneutic and proairetic which are concerned with the conventional realist novels are marginalized or even absent. The article examines the writerly text makers of the author role, the theme of biography, the notion of literary criticism and the narration of the novel, referring to the codes creating the writerly text. The paper finally concludes that the semiotic sophistication and innovations in the narrative act of the novel stem from the categories discussed in the essay, ending in the construction of a highly sophisticated writerly text.

The present study attempts to demonstrate how different texts with various author attitudes depict the oppressed subjects of Stalin’s time.  For this purpose, Roland Barthes’ notion of ‘Modes of Writing’ and Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘author’ are employed in reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1963) and Julian Barnes’ The Noise of Time (2016). The two novels mainly address the politically subjected characters in the Stalinist regime with different standpoints of author figure. Originating the authors’ modes of writing in the mentioned texts, on one hand, and the analysis of author-function, on the other, shall satisfy the comparative tendencies in this research and show how these theoretical frameworks can help a critical understanding of the texts. The subjects described in these novels, although similar in their situations and characteristics and subjected to the same institution of power, are narrated from different author roles and provide a somewhat similar subjectivity. The author figure as a subject of ideology and the text as a created object of an author can be thoroughly analyzed within the proposed theoretical framework; therefore, the main objective of this paper is to explore the depicted subjectivities of similar subjects from different standpoints of distinguishable author figures.