Overview
Reading is a peculiar kind of experience. Although its practice and theory have a very long tradition, the question of aesthetic pleasure is as perplexing as ever. Why do we read? What exactly thrills us in the text? One of the most prominent scholars having addressed these questions in the twentieth century is undeniably Roland Barthes, who distinguished between the «ordinary» pleasure of reading and bliss (jouissance), a delight so profound that it cannot be expressed in words. Taking his work as a central reference, and revisiting some of his seminal publications on the subject such as Empire of Signs (1970) and The Pleasure of the Text (1973), this collection of essays adopts a similar interdisciplinary approach to explore a broad range of themes and issues related to the notion of readerly enjoyment, between form and content, emotion and reason, and escapist and knowledge-seeking responses to the text: how do literary and ideological pleasures intersect? In what ways do perversions, madness or even fatigue contribute to the pleasure of the text? How do writing and signs, sense and significance, but also image and text interact in the intermedial process of reading? How can paratexts – i.e. the margins of the text, including footnotes – and metatexts play a part in the reader’s enjoyment?
Full Product Details
Author: Hugo Azérad ,
Marion Schmid ,
Fabien Arribert-Narce ,
Fuhito Endo
Publisher: Peter Lang International Academic Publishers
Imprint: Peter Lang International Academic Publishers
Edition: New edition
Volume: 43
Weight: 0.266kg
ISBN: 9781789977004
ISBN 10: 1789977002
Pages: 170
Publication Date: 24 September 2021
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Reviews
Under the aegis of an updated Barthes, these complementary analyses of the role of the image and signs, of style and its unconscious mechanisms, of paratexts and readers, cast a fresh light on the rich gamut of pleasures found in the reading encounter, as well as on the desires generated in and by texts. (Vincent Ferre, Professor of Comparative Literature, Universite Paris-Est Creteil)
Author Information
Fabien Arribert-Narce is Lecturer in French and Comparative Literature at the University of Edinburgh, where his current research focuses on the reception of Japanese culture by French writers and filmmakers since 1970 and on literary and artistic responses to the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Fuhito Endo is Professor of English Literature at Seikei University, Tokyo. His research specialises in the history of British psychoanalysis and its relationship with contemporary Modernist literature. Kamila Pawlikowska currently teaches English, sociology and psychology at Rochester Independent College in Kent. Her research interests include images of the human body and face in literature and the visual arts, intercultural communication and global education.
