Roland Barthes, S/Z

Graham Allen (University College Cork)
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S/Z

is Roland Barthes's most important and certainly his most sustained critical analysis of a literary text. Barthes's study has had a major impact on literary criticism in the English-speaking world (English version,

S/Z

, trans. Richard Miller, New York: Hill and Wang, 1974) despite the fact that its particular mode of critical practice lies outside of any strictly repeatable or imitable model of reading.

S/Z

is also a landmark text within the history of modern literary theory, lying as it does precisely at the borderline between structuralism and post-structuralism. Barthes during the 1960s had been deeply involved in the project to establish a structural analysis of narrative (see “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,”(1) Roland Barthes,

The Semiotic Challenge

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2519 words

Citation: Allen, Graham. "S/Z". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 20 September 2002 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=10346, accessed 19 March 2024.]

10346 S/Z 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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