Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: S/z, Mythologies, Camera Lucida, Incidents, the Pleasure of the Text, a Lover's Discourse: Fragments, Elements of Semiology, Writer Sollers. Source: Wikipedia. Free updates online. Not illustrated. Excerpt: S/Z, published in 1970, is Roland Barthes's structuralist analysis of "Sarrasine", the short story by Honoré de Balzac. Barthes methodically moves through the text of the story, denoting where and how different codes of meaning function. Barthes's study has had a major impact on literary criticism and is historically located at the crossroads of structuralism and post-structuralism. Barthes's analysis is influenced by the structuralist linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure; both Barthes and Saussure aim to explore and demystify the link between a sign and its meaning. But, Barthes moves beyond structuralism in that he criticises the propensity of narratology to establish the overall system out of which all individual narratives are created, which makes the text lose its specificity (différance)(I). Barthes uses five specific "codes" that thematically, semiotically, and otherwise make a literary text reflect structures that are interwoven, but not in a definite way that closes the meaning of the text (XII). Therefore, Barthes insists on the (different degrees of) plurality of a text - a plurality that should not be reduced by any privileged interpretation. Barthes also flags the way in which the reader is an active producer of interpretations of the text, rather than a passive consumer. (II). Barthes defines five codes that define a network (or a topos) that form a space of meaning that the text runs through. But, these codes and their mutual relations are not clear structures, because it would close the multivariance of the text. Thus, Barthes defines the code in a vague way:
| | Books by Roland Barthes (Study Guide): Sz, Mythologies, Camera Lucida, Incidents, the Pleasure of the Text, a Lover's Discourse: Fragments |  | 9.16 |  |