S/Z: An Essay

by Roland Barthes

Book Overview

Preface by Richard Howard. Translated by Richard Miller. This is Barthes's scrupulous literary analysis of Balzac's short story "Sarrasine." This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374521670
• Release Date: January 1975
• Publisher: Hill and Wang
• Length: 271 Pages
• Weight: 0.84 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.2" x 0.8" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

The only literary critic you will ever need to read.

I first read this book decades ago, at a time when I thought that all literary critics were full of hot air. The world of literary criticism is not as bad as it once was--thanks to M. Barthe, but why bother with the rest, when you can read the best? There is nothing in this book that you can not learn from the poetry of Wallace Stevens or the fiction of Virginia Woolf. However, Barthes does something that I would have thought impossible, had I not read S/Z. Rather than hinting at truths with conflicts or alluding to them with silences the way that poets do, he points his finger right at them and names them with simple, easy to understand words. He is a lot like William Blake in this way, without the visions of angels.

Slow Motion Reading

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.

What Am I Getting Myself Into?

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?"