The Pleasure of the Text

`Taken together, The Pleasure of the Text and S/Z force us to notice how much of the most interesting thought today is being carried forward in what we used to call `literary criticism,' and how important Barthes' own contribution to redefinition of the field has been.' The New York Times Book Review . What is it we do when we enjoy a text? What is the pleasure of reading? Roland Barthes has found a way of apparently abandoning the systematics of his earlier studies, a way of giving himself up to an evidently random succession of fragments - facets, aphorisms, touches and nudges, bubbles, `phylacteries' of an invisible design. The most arbitrary of orders, the alphabetical, governs his consequent series of proses , which gather like filings in a magnetic field to constitute, for perhaps the first time in the history of criticism, an erotics of reading . The Pleasure of Text is now established as a classic of late twentieth century literary, critial, cultural and semiotic theory. Its impact over the last 15 years has been profound over a range of disciplines, its interest as fresh now as when it was first published.
This edition makes readily available one of Barthes' canonical works.