Preface by Richard Howard. Translated by Richard Miller. This is Barthes's scrupulous literary analysis of Balzac's short story "Sarrasine."
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"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
About the Author
Roland Barthes was born in 1915 and studied French literature and the classics at the University of Paris. After teaching French at universities in Romania and Egypt, he joined the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, where he devoted himself to research in sociology and lexicology. He was a professor at the College de France until his death in 1980.
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By G. Steirer
Format:Paperback
A good question to ask yourself when reviewing a work of literary theory is: what do you want the work to do? With much French theory in particular, the reader begins with very particular questions (whether they be personal or dissertation-related) that the book may or may not be interested in answering. Barthes--and S/Z in particular--is a case in point.
For anyone interested in unconvential techniques of writing or reading, the introduction can function as something of a manifesto. Much more radical than Barthes's more structuralist works, I found it immensely helpful in formulating theories of writing not situated in the individual subject.
The "critical reading" of the Zola story that makes up the remainder of S/Z, however, not only is intolerably boring, but appears to be a structuralist codification of the introduction's radicalism. Like much literary theory aimed at production rather than analysis (I'm thinking in particular of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetics), the produced work almost always disappoints the model. In light of this, the question that arises is whether the work reflects the true intentions of the model or whether the work itself is merely deficient? For Barthes this is the eminent question. And in S/Z you can see him straddling his stucturalist and extra-structuralist tendencies with wildly contradictory results. For those not familiar with or interested in Barthes the thinker, however, the contradiction is bound to repel.
That said, S/Z is required reading for anyone studying literary theory or French intellectual history. If, however, your interest is more casual, check out Mythologies, a Lover's Discourse, or Camera Lucida.
By A Customer
Format: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.
Format: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?"
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