The Pleasure of the Text

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

• A Lover's Discourse: Fragments
• Image-Music-Text
• Mythologies: The Complete Edition, in a New Translation
• Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
• Elements of Semiology
• S/Z: An Essay
• Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes
• Empire of Signs
• Writing Degree Zero
• Architectures of Possibility: After Innovative Writing