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Title: S/Z: An Essay by Roland Barthes, Richard Miller, Richard Howard ISBN: 0-374-52167-0 Publisher: Noonday Press Pub. Date: 01 January, 1975 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (3 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: structuralist? extra-structuralist? step right up
Comment: A good question to ask yourself when reviewing a work of literary theory is: what do you want the work to do? With much French theory in particular, the reader begins with very particular questions (whether they be personal or dissertation-related) that the book may or may not be interested in answering. Barthes--and S/Z in particular--is a case in point.
For anyone interested in unconvential techniques of writing or reading, the introduction can function as something of a manifesto. Much more radical than Barthes's more structuralist works, I found it immensely helpful in formulating theories of writing not situated in the individual subject.
The "critical reading" of the Zola story that makes up the remainder of S/Z, however, not only is intolerably boring, but appears to be a structuralist codification of the introduction's radicalism. Like much literary theory aimed at production rather than analysis (I'm thinking in particular of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetics), the produced work almost always disappoints the model. In light of this, the question that arises is whether the work reflects the true intentions of the model or whether the work itself is merely deficient? For Barthes this is the eminent question. And in S/Z you can see him straddling his stucturalist and extra-structuralist tendencies with wildly contradictory results. For those not familiar with or interested in Barthes the thinker, however, the contradiction is bound to repel.
That said, S/Z is required reading for anyone studying literary theory or French intellectual history. If, however, your interest is more casual, check out Mythologies, a Lover's Discourse, or Camera Lucida.
Rating: 5
Summary: Slow Motion Reading
Comment: I decided to write a paper on Barthes' S/Z after it was highly recommended to me by my professor of literary criticism. Criticism usually puts me to sleep when I read it, and this professor claimed that S/Z kept him up all night, it was so fascinating. This was not the case for my first reading of S/Z, but the more I opened the book, the more interesting it became. Barthes' criticism is of the most unusual kind; what he writes about Balzac's Sarrasine is "neither wholly image nor analysis" - it is his reading of Balzac's text, a very close and detailed reading. I began to appreciate S/Z even more when I began my own project of dissecting a text using Barthes' theories. It was a difficult endeavor, but it helped me to understand what an incredible piece of work S/Z is. Barthes uses Sarrasine to look at liturature - what it is, who reads it, what happens when we read, and to show that reading for the consumption of stories is only to deny ourselves of the real pleasure of the text.
Rating: 4
Summary: What Am I Getting Myself Into?
Comment: Understand what this little book is and its significance. Barthes begins with a short story by Balzac and then plays with its interpretation. He "rereads" the story using different treatments. His goal: to show that there is no Author who gives an Absolute Meaning to the text -- that it's the reader who provides his/her own meaning to it. The Author is dead, long live the Reader. You may or may not get this concept, but trust me, it's a significant shift in literary theory. I've taken the time to write all this in hopes you don't read it the way I did the first time, wondering "What in heck is this?"
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Title: The Pleasure of the Text by Roland Barthes, Richard Miller ISBN: 0374521603 Publisher: Noonday Press Pub. Date: 01 January, 1975 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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Title: Image-Music-Text by Roland Barthes ISBN: 0374521360 Publisher: Noonday Press Pub. Date: 01 July, 1978 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Mythologies by Roland Barthes, Annette Lavers ISBN: 0374521506 Publisher: Noonday Press Pub. Date: 01 January, 1972 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Illuminations by Walter Benjamin ISBN: 0805202412 Publisher: Schocken Books Pub. Date: 13 January, 1969 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The Dialogic Imagination : Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, Michael Holquist, Vadim Liapunov, Kenneth Brostrom ISBN: 029271534X Publisher: Univ of Texas Press Pub. Date: 1982 List Price(USD): $17.44 |
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