Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Truth And Consequences: Renaud Camus And The Personal, Brian G. Kennelly

World Languages and Cultures

A year before his untimely death in 1980, in the days before the internet, before even the minitel bleu or rose, Roland Barthes compared the personals – at that time still print-based – of two popular French dailies. On the one hand, the advertisements in Le Nouvel Observateur belied artifice, he noted. The information their writers shared publicly with potential mates revealed a certain banal artificiality. Despite the obvious effort the creators of the ads had put into catching the eye of possible matches, in spite of the care with which they had weighed the words before ultimately selecting …