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Loading... The Pleasure of the Text (original 1973; edition 1975)by Roland Barthes, Richard Miller (Translator)
Work InformationThe Pleasure of the Text by Roland Barthes (1973)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. I found this book to be incredibly dangerous; at no point does Barthes ever mention the fact that if you physically fuck a book you could get a papercut!! This is a theoretical blunder of such dramatic proportions that his ruminations on pleasure, jouissance, the Text, loss etc. lose all value. It's a bloody shame. ( ) Creo que todo estudioso (o incluso aficionado) de la literatura debería leer este libro. Incluso aunque no llegues a entender del todo la terminología ni la exposición del autor (como fue, en muchas ocasiones, mi caso). Barthes es un excelente ensayista, y su forma tan apasionada y crítica a la vez de explicar su tema resulta muy conmovedora. Además, en la "Lección inaugural", se puede leer una de las mejores definiciones de literatura que yo me he encontrado en cualquier texto académico. Que livro delicioso! Com uma escrita descomplicada e de fácil compreensão - li numa sentada, Barthes vai alinhavando psicanálise e o papel dialético do escritor/leitor em seu prazer dual. Meu único porém quanto a esta edição é que o tradutor preferiu traduzir jouissance como fruição e não como gozo, este que seria mais pertinente ao conteúdo da obra que busca dialogar com a psicanálise. 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 Derrida 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. no reviews | add a review
"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. No library descriptions found. |
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