 Cover of the first edition | |
| Author | Roland Barthes |
|---|---|
| Original title | Le Plaisir du Texte |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
| Subject | Literary theory |
| Publisher | Éditions du Seuil |
Publication date | 1973 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 105 |
| ISBN | 2-02-006060-4 |
| OCLC | 10314663 |
The Pleasure of the Text (French : Le Plaisir du Texte) is a 1973 book by the literary theorist Roland Barthes.
Barthes sets out some of his ideas about literary theory. He divides the effects of texts into two: plaisir ("pleasure") and jouissance , translated as "bliss" but the French word also carries the meaning of "orgasm".
The distinction corresponds to a further distinction Barthes makes between texte lisible and texte scriptible, translated respectively as "readerly" and "writerly" texts (a more literal translation would be "readable" and "writable"). Scriptible is a neologism in French. The pleasure of the text corresponds to the readerly text, which does not challenge the reader's position as a subject. The writerly text provides bliss, which explodes literary codes and allows the reader to break out of his or her subject position.
The "readerly" and the "writerly" texts were identified and explained in Barthes' S/Z . Barthes argues that "writerly" texts are more important than "readerly" ones because he sees the text's unity as forever being re-established by its composition, the codes that form and constantly slide around within the text. The reader of a readerly text is largely passive, whereas the person who engages with a writerly text has to make an active effort, and even to re-enact the actions of the writer himself. The different codes (hermeneutic, action, symbolic, semic, and historical) that Barthes defines in S/Z inform and reinforce one another, making for an open text that is indeterminant precisely because it can always be written anew.
As a consequence, although one may experience pleasure in the readerly text, it is when one sees the text from the writerly point of view that the experience is blissful.
Few writers in cultural studies and the social sciences have used and developed the distinctions that Barthes makes. The British sociologist of education Stephen Ball has argued that the National Curriculum in England and Wales is a writerly text, by which he means that schools, teachers and pupils have a certain amount of scope to reinterpret and develop it. [ citation needed ] On the other hand, artist Roy Ascott's pioneering telematic artwork, La Plissure du Texte ("The Pleating of the Texte", 1983) drew inspiration from Barthes' Le Plaisir du Texte. Ascott modified the title to emphasize the pleasure of collective textual pleating. In Ascott's artwork, the pleating of the text resulted from a process that the artist calls "distributed authorship," which expands Barthes' concept of the "readerly text." [1] In Ascott's work, the text itself is the result of a collaborative reading/writing process among participants around the world, connected via computer networking (telematics). Ascott's work thus unravels the distinction between readers and writers, demonstrating a much greater degree of permeability than Barthes' distinction permits (and beyond Barthes' theory of the death of the author). Moreover, the mechanism of distributed authorship enabled Ascott's "planetary fairytale" to self-pleat in a way that, like a surrealist exquisite corpse, could not have been the product of a single mind. [2] Rather, Ascott suggests, the work emerged as the result of an emergent field of collective intelligence that joined minds together in a global field of consciousness. [3]
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Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. His work engaged in the analysis of a variety of sign systems, mainly derived from Western popular culture. His ideas explored a diverse range of fields and influenced the development of many schools of theory, including structuralism, anthropology, literary theory, and post-structuralism.
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Lisible is a word from the French for 'legible' used to denote a text that requires no true participation from its audience. It was first coined by literary critic, Roland Barthes, in his book, S/Z and expanded from his essay the "Death of an Author". Barthes contrasts texte lisible, denoting a closed work, with texte scriptible, a text open to interpretation. In Barthes opinion, lisible works provide no challenge to the reader's preconceived notions and thus are inferior to scriptible works, exemplified by modernist literature. Barthes contends that lisible works still emphasize the importance of the author where instead "the reader is the very space in which are inscribed, without any being lost, all the citations a writing consists of; the unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination."