By Roland Barthes
What's it that we do after we get pleasure from a textual content? what's the excitement of studying? The French critic and theorist Roland Barthes’s solutions to those questions represent "perhaps for the 1st time within the heritage of feedback . . . not just a poetics of analyzing . . . yet a way more tough success, an erotics of examining . . . . Like filings which assemble to shape a determine in a magnetic box, the elements and items the following do come jointly, decided to verify the excitement we needs to soak up our interpreting as opposed to the indifference of (mere) knowledge." --Richard Howard
Read or Download The Pleasure of the Text PDF
Best literary theory books
Living Speech: Resisting the Empire of Force
Language is our key to imagining the area, others, and ourselves. but occasionally our methods of conversing dehumanize others and trivialize human adventure. In warfare people are imagined as enemies to be killed. The language of race objectifies these it touches, and propaganda disables democracy. advertisements reduces us to shoppers, and clichés spoil the lifetime of the mind's eye.
The American Thriller: Generic Innovation and Social Change in the 1970s (Crime Files)
What's the American mystery? Has it constructed through the years? What was once it like long ago? it is a e-book approximately thrillers and discovering what American thrillers have been like in a selected period—the Nineteen Seventies. reading '70s texts approximately crime, police, detectives, corruption, paranoia and revenge, the yank mystery goals to open the talk on style in mild of viewers concept, literary historical past, and where of renowned fiction in the mean time of its creation.
The booklet deals readings of discourses approximately foodstuff in quite a lot of sources, from canonical Victorian novels by way of authors comparable to Dickens, Gaskell, and Hardy to parliamentary speeches, royal proclamations, and modification Acts. It considers the cultural politics and poetics of nutrients with regards to problems with race, classification, gender, regionalism, urbanization, colonialism, and imperialism that allows you to detect how nationwide identification and Otherness are developed and internalized.
Collection of Stephen Greenblatt's paintings
- Poetic Machinations: Allegory, Surrealism, and Postmodern Poetic Form
- Why Do We Care about Literary Characters?
- Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism
- Alchemical Mercury: A Theory of Ambivalence
Additional info for The Pleasure of the Text
Sample text
A certain art of singing can give an idea of this vocal writing; but since melody is dead, we may find it more easily today at the cinema. In fact, it suffices that the cinema capture the sound of speech close up (this is, in fact, the generalized definition of the "grain" of writing) 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 (that the voice, that writing, be as fresh, supple, lubricated, delicately granular and vibrant as an animal's 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.
Were we fond of neologisms, we might define the theory of the text as an hyphology (hyphos is the tissue and the spider's web). Although the theory of the text has specifically designated significance (in the sense Julia Kristeva has given this word) as the site of bliss, although it has affirmed the simultaneously erotic and critical value of textual practice, these propositions are often forgotten, repressed, stifled. And yet: is the radical materialism this theory tends toward conceivable without the notions of pleasure, of bliss?
Notion of a book (of a text) in which is braided, woven, in the most personal way, the relation of every kind of bliss: those of "life" and those of the text, in which reading and the risks of real life are subject to the same anamnesis. Imagine an aesthetic (if the word has not become too depreciated) based entirely (completely, radically, in every sense of the word) on the pleasure of the consumer, whoever he may be, to whatever class, whatever group he may belong, without respect to cultures or languages: the consequences would be huge, perhaps even harrowing (Brecht has sketched such an aesthetic of pleasure; of all his proposals, this is the one most frequently forgotten).
