The Pleasure of the Text

by Roland Barthes

Other authorsRichard Miller (Translator)

Paperback, 1975

Status

Available

Call number

401

Genres

Publication

Hill and Wang (1975), Paperback, 80 pages

Description

"What is it that we do when we enjoy a text? What is the pleasure of reading? The French critic and theorist Roland Barthes's answers to these questions constitute "perhaps for the first time in the history of criticism ... not only a poetics of reading ... but a much more difficult achievement, an erotics of reading ... Like filings which gather to form a figure in a magnetic field, the parts and pieces here do come together, determined to affirm the pleasure we must take in our reading as against the indifference of (mere) knowledge."--Richard Howard.

User reviews

LibraryThing member breadhat

This is a beautiful book, if not always a clear source of theoretical insight. Given how short it is, there is really no reason not to give it a little of your time. The culminating section on "Voice" is particularly gorgeous: "In fact, it suffices that the cinema capture the sound of speech close

up... and make us hear in their materiality, their sensuality, the breath, the gutturals, the fleshiness of the lips, a whole presence of the human muzzle... to succeed in shifting the signified a great distance and in throwing, so to speak, the anonymous body of the actor into my ear: it granulates, it crackles, it caresses, it grates, it cuts, it comes: that is bliss." The charming language of Barthes is obviously in good hands with this translation.

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LibraryThing member thorold

A series of very short essays (mostly 100-200 words each - the whole book is only about 90 pages long) which often read more like prose-poems than literary theory. Barthes speculates about the relationship between reading and pleasure, and tries to pin down a distinction between the

culturally-mediated plaisir and the erotic jouissance and locate this in different families of texts. Of course it's also a game in which he is also trying to manipulate the reader's plaisir and jouissance by deploying the same textual strategies he's writing about (he calls literary studies the Kamasutra of the text), and playfulness often wins over clarity, but no-one is likely to mind that much. A book you can read with great enjoyment (of whatever kind!) and also a useful source of quotations to back up just about any argument you might be trying to make in your own essays...

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LibraryThing member Marse

In the middle of reading this short book (66 pages), I remembered a time, a long time ago--I might still have been in high school), when I was invited by the neighbor who taught me French to a talk by a French author at UCI. I could hold my own in a conversation, going beyond basic introductory

forms, and I had read a few novels (short ones) in French. The author, whose name I've completely forgotten, was a woman and my neighbor was quite enthused that she was at UCI. I expected not to understand everything, but I was not prepared for how little I did understand. At first I listened very attentively, trying to catch as much meaning as I could, after a while--exhausted from that effort, I decided just to listen without trying to understand, and even that became unbearable. I concentrated on the speaker's face and gestures and the reactions of everyone in the room, and this struck me as extremely hilarious. It was all I could do to keep from bursting out in unstoppable peals of laughter. The absurdity of everything was so acute, and it went on for so long! This is how I felt reading Barthes' "The Pleasure of the Text." I'm no novice at reading literary criticism and theoretical writings, but this was all but incomprehensible to me. Our department in Graduate school was firmly in the Structuralism and Semiology camp, the Slavic variety. We had heard of Deconstruction and Derridas and even Barthes, but they were never discussed in our literary seminars--for that you had to visit the French and English departments of our stately university. So this manner of discussing literature and the examples (if you can call them that) he gives made no sense at all to me. There were times where it seemed like I was grasping the gist, and then he would make a statement that made all the meaning dissipate for me. I understood the underlying/blatant metaphor of his text (where 'pleasure' and 'bliss' are sexual/sensual concepts), but it never really came to fruition for me. The whole thing seemed too much like my experience with the French writer. It was over my head.

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LibraryThing member wickenden

I read a significant portion of this in a class on the "genre of poetry". It's quite beautiful if somewhat difficult to pierce (that's a literary pun if I read the book right). Anyway, I need to read it all. Rating is based on what I thought of what I read.

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