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

Lucy O’Meara (University of Kent at Canterbury)
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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

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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

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. 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: by 1973, Barthes’s familiar and oft-caricatured argument, most forcefully articulated in his 1968 essay “The Death of the Author”, has become…

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Citation: O’Meara, Lucy. "Le Plaisir du texte". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 03 August 2005 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=10348, accessed 19 March 2024.]

10348 Le Plaisir du texte 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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