Roland Barthes, Le Plaisir du texte [The Pleasure of the Text]

Lucy O’Meara (University of Kent at Canterbury)

Ed. by Graham Allen, University College Cork
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.5.2.07: French Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Kate Averis (University of Western Australia), Hugo Azerad (University of Cambridge), Patrick ffrench (King's College London), Edward Forman (University of Bristol), Akane Kawakami (Birkbeck, University of London), Siobhán McIlvanney (King's College London), Sinan Richards (King's College London), Tim Unwin (University of Bristol), David Williams (University of Sheffield)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1973

Places

France (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Non-Fiction
- Commentary / Criticism (literary)

Resources

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Le Plaisir du texte

(Paris: Seuil, 1973; trans. Richard Howard, New York: Hill and Wang, 1975) can be viewed as the first text of Barthes’s “late” period. His first book-length text after the astonishing

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Le Plaisir du texte

revisits some of that text’s concerns regarding the reader’s production of meaning. Its focus on the moment of reading and its use of a dual paradigm (of which more below) echo, to some extent, the rationale and methodology of

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. Hand-in-hand with this, of course, there is the implicit assumption that the author as source of authority, or, as Barthes puts it here, “the author as institution”, is dead: by 1973, Barthes’s familiar and oft-caricatured argument, most forcefully articulated in his 1968 essay “The Death of the Author”, has become…

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2745 words

Citation: O’Meara, Lucy. "Le Plaisir du texte". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 03 August 2005 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=10348, accessed 21 November 2024.]

Roland Barthes, Le Plaisir du texte [The Pleasure of the Text]

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