The Pleasure of the Text by Roland Barthes

The Pleasure of the Text by Roland Barthes

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

Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was born in Normandy, raised in Paris, and was educated at the Sorbonne and Centre national de la recherche scientifique. His first book, Mythologies, about myths in popular culture, was published in 1957. He was a central figure in schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, and post-structuralism. His works include S/Z, Camera Lucida, and the essay The Death of the Author. Northwestern University Press is reissuing Barthes's New Critical Essays this season as well.

Linda Coverdale is an award=winning translator of more than fifty books. In 2001, the French government awarder her the title of Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.