Download or read book The Pleasure of the Text written by Roland Barthes and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1975 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is it that we do when we enjoy a text? What is the pleasure of reading? The French critic and theorist Roland Barthes's answers to these questions constitute "perhaps for the first time in the history of criticism . . . not only a poetics of reading . . . but a much more difficult achievement, an erotics of reading . . . . Like filings which gather to form a figure in a magnetic field, the parts and pieces here do come together, determined to affirm the pleasure we must take in our reading as against the indifference of (mere) knowledge." --Richard Howard