S/Z: An Essay [Paperback]

Roland Barthes (Author), Richard Miller (Translator), Richard Howard (Preface)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 1975 | ISBN-10: 0374521670 | ISBN-13: 978-0374521677

Preface by Richard Howard. Translated by Richard Miller. This is Barthes's scrupulous literary analysis of Balzac's short story "Sarrasine."

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Language was both a luxury and a discipline for Barthes. He pursued a subject through language until he cornered it, until its disguise fell away and it was revealed in a kind of epiphany. In his own way, he cleaned the face of Paris more thoroughly than Andre Malraux did when he ordered its buildings washed down to their original colors and arranged for lights to be played upon them. Musing on the kind of painting done by someone like Ingres, Barthes says that 'painters have left movement the amplified sign of the unstable . . . the solemn shudder of a pose impossible to fix in time . . . the motionless overvaluation of the ineffable.' This might also serve as his definition of classical French prose, and in order to escape its encroachment, Barthes prodded, squeezed and sniffed at language, like a great chef buying fruits and vegetables. He munched distinctions. His sentence rhythms were those of a man who talks with his hands."--Anatole Broyard

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 271 pages
• Publisher: Hill and Wang (January 1, 1975)
• Language: English, French
• ISBN-10: 0374521670
• ISBN-13: 978-0374521677
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #66,730 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #29 in Books > Literature & Fiction > History & Criticism > European

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Slow Motion Reading, August 22, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: S/Z: An Essay (Paperback)

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.

49 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars What Am I Getting Myself Into?, January 9, 2000

By 

Robert Jordan (San Diego, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: S/Z: An Essay (Paperback)

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?"

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Barthes" S/Z: "Writerly" Reading Rules, May 3, 2011

By 

Martin Asiner "Adjunct College Instructor" (Jersey City, NJ) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: S/Z: An Essay (Paperback)

Roland Barthes began as a structuralist and in S/Z, he began to branch off into post-structuralism. S/Z is a three hundred page dissection of a short story by Balzac called Sarrasine. The plot of Sarrasine is relatively uncomplicated. A sculptor falls in love with a woman who is actually a castrato, a man who has had his penis surgically removed. In an earlier published article, "The Death of the Author," Barthes uses Sarrasine as a starting point that leads toward involving the reader in a multi-faceted exploration of the story's plurality of voices even as he diminishes the role of the writer. Barthes greatly expanded this premise into a full-length book, S/Z. Critics have often wondered how to perceive it. Most agree that Barthes takes the basic concepts of structuralism and expands them so hugely that the result is less a scholarly treatise on structuralism than some weirdly lumped parody of it. Whatever traditional elements of structuralism are examined, by the time that Barthes finishes, structuralism as a working and generally accepted theory of literary criticism has been so thoroughly sliced and diced that its remaining strands seem wispy, fragmented, and totally unable to account for the plurality of discourses that Barthes insists are right there to be discerned. Reading S/Z requires one to reach a mindset that judges it as either an exhilarating voyage that embraces a new way to read established texts or as an upsetting deconstructing of long held assumptions that used to divide the universe into emotionally satisfying and complete entities.

Prior to the publication on S/Z, most critics tended to view literature as exemplifying the belief in the Universality of Man--that man had a basic and eternal soul that represented a series of fixed and basically wholesome attributes. The literature that man wrote subordinated a myriad of free-floating pluralities of thought to inhere within a centered core of meaning. The result was that both reader and writer assumed that man and his universe could harmonize in a mutually receptive collaboration that seemed to be as "natural" as it was eternal. This tendency for the reader to accept passively the author's explicit and implicit set of themes and assumptions in a conventional and predictable manner Barthes called "readerly." Barthes then threw an intellectual fragmentation grenade into the collective and overly composed psyches of readers whom Barthes saw as needing a weaning from their smug complacency. In this new paradigm of reader involvement, Barthes urges his readers to recognize that whatever the nature of the text that they are reading, that text is not composed of "new" elements. In fact, all texts are merely recombinants of previous texts, and these texts are similarly composed of other and earlier recognizable elements. It is the readers' duty to perceive that these texts are codes which operate within an overarching cultural network, leading readers to expand their vision outward as they follow an infinitely expanding set of philosophical and literary threads. To do this well demands that readers work much harder than their readerly peers. These readers must involve themselves more closely in the act of reading. They are far more likely than one who is readerly oriented to reinvest the text with a plurality of previously submerged meanings. In fact, Barthes suggests that when this reinvesting reaches a critical point, a brand-new text emerges, one which is a function of an aggressive reader interacting with a text that is no longer seen as closed or complete. This tendency for the reader to create a "new" text merely by following the recursive and infinite loopings of delineated codes Barthes called "writerly."

Barthes writes of authors, mostly of the classical sort, who created novels that focused on not upsetting the literary applecart by avoiding contradiction and welcoming a centering of meaning. These novels had clearly defined hierarchies. These inward-looking novels were of the readerly sort that encouraged readers not to question the Way Things Were. Modern novels, by contrast, demand of the reader not only to question underlying assumptions and ideologies but also of the author to engage the reader to do precisely that. As far as textuality was concerned, readers could decode any text--even otherwise readerly ones--in a writerly way by whisking away the bland illusion of unity and coherence to discern the fragmented unreality that simmered underneath.

The "codes" that Barthes uses to configure all texts are the same codes that can be used to give shape and form to virtually all aspects of culture from books, to art, to television commercials, and even to professional wrestling. Barthes never assumes that any code comes in a pre-packaged ball of reality that is a subset of some ultimate context. Rather, these codes are people dependent, the meanings of which have relevance only to those who are already conversant with them. Since readerly texts, in Barthes' opinion are no more than the enervated relics of discarded ideologies, it is essential that writerly texts step into this literary vacuum as a shield against the predations of a thuggish ruling class that once needed such linguistic chicanery to retain the reins of power. In S/Z, Barthes writes of a way of thought that is light years from traditional structuralism and very closely mirrors the soon to be felt impact of the deconstructionists who followed just a few years later.