Roland Barthes: Le Plaisir du texte [The Pleasure of the Text]

Le Plaisir du texte (Paris: Seuil, 1973; trans. Richard Howard, New York: Hill and Wang, 1975) can be viewed as the first text of Barthes’s “late” period. His first book-length text after the astonishing S/Z, Le Plaisir du texte revisits some of that text’s concerns regarding the reader’s production of meaning. Its focus on the moment of reading and its use of a dual paradigm (of which more below) echo, to some extent, the rationale and methodology of S/Z. Hand-in-hand with this, of course, there is the implicit assumption that the author as source of authority, or, as Barthes puts it here, “the author as institution”, is dead