Dear students, 

Several of me asked you to post the map I drew of Camera Lucida, Part One–so here it is! This is (of course) no substitute for careful reading and re-reading. What it does, however, is offer a visual representation of Barthes’ thought process as he moves–haltingly, recursively–towards his major insight: dividing the photograph in the “studium” and the “punctum.” The map does not define these terms–we’ll discuss them in depth in class, and I want you to work them out, to some extent, on your own–but it is *just possible* that using it alongside the text will strengthen your sense of their definitions. 

NOTE: I have not mapped Part Two, which you’ll also be reading. (This map in fact gets us only to around page 40, when Barthes–having established his theory, at last–starts putting it to use, in analyzing individual photographs).  If you want to take a crack at a Part Two map, by all means, do so–and post it with Blog Post #4.

-Prof Kolb