Why Should Geographers Lost In The Field Read Roland Barthes?

Abstract

The aim of this article is to propose a comparison that will enlighten the things that occur between geographers and their fields. By operating a transfer between text and field on the one hand, and fieldwork and criticism on the other, I want to claim that some tools emanating from literary criticism can be used by geographers to construct their field as a reflexive object and to analyze the conditions of the production of geographical knowledge. My demonstration is based on the “Nouvelle critique” – i.e. the French structuralist criticism of the 1970s – and especially on Roland Barthes’s famous article summing up his conception of text, entitled “Texte (theorie du)” (1975). The first part of the article focuses on Barthes’s theory of text, while the second part proposes a comparison between geographers’ fields and text.