Roland Barthes

‘Theory was cool. Theory was French. Theory was also, strange though it might sound, sexy.’ When Emily Eakin first encountered ‘theory’ as a Harvard undergraduate in the 1980s, it marked the start of an obsession, intense as a love affair. She wasn’t the only one. For the Anglophone world, France has long represented a style of thinking that is just that: stylish. It’s not for nothing that an estimated three million American tourists flock to the boulevards of Paris each year. The place is synonymous with glamour in its most alluringly intelligent form.

It’s been a while since I read a good cento, from the Latin and derived from the Greek, I need not remind Spectator readers, meaning ‘patchwork’, and thus a literary work composed of quotations from other writers, the earliest known example being Hosidius Geta’s Medea, consisting entirely of lines from Virgil and which is almost as good as it sounds. Contemporary literary centos, or cento-like creations, include a lot of very bad found poems but also Graham Rawle’s simply incredible Woman’s World (2005), a novel collaged from cut-up lines from women’s magazines, and David Shields’s profoundly plagiaristic work of literary criticism, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2010).