The Faint Smiles of Postures: Roland Barthes’s Broadcast Interviews [Annex: List of print, radio, and filmed interviews given by Roland Barthes]

In this article, I illustrate the state-of-the-art of the research on Barthes’s interviews and quickly analyse three of them, giving some examples of analysis of his radio and TV interviews using the concept of literary posture. First, I will summarize research that has been done on the interview to define its boundaries as a genre in order to approach an analysis of the whole corpus of Barthes’s interviews, both in print and broadcast media. Then, I focus on traditional literary postures of French intellectuals which can also be found in Barthes’s broadcast interviews. My short itinerary follows three steps: 1) the engaged intellectual, the intellectual as amateur, the "génie malheureux". The aim is to show the itinerary that leads Barthes to the posture of the original writer, that emerges in Barthes from an opposition between the posture of Castorp within the community life of "The Magic Mountain" by Thomas Mann and the posture adopted by the model of André Gide. The main result of his research is to update a list including all the interviews (print, radio, and filmed) given by Barthes as the investigation within different archives has more than doubled the total amount of his interviews listed before.