The Pleasure of the Text

The Pleasure of the Text PDF Author: Roland Barthes
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780374521608
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 84

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Book Description
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

The Pleasure of the Text

The Pleasure of the Text PDF Author: Roland Barthes
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780374521608
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 84

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Book Description
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

The Pleasure In/of the Text

The Pleasure In/of the Text PDF Author: Fabien Arribert-Narce
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781789977264
Category : Literature
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
"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? Taking the work of Roland Barthes as a central reference, the aim of this collection of essays is to investigate a variety of themes and issues associated with the question of readerly pleasure. Pleasure 'in' the text is related to the content of the text and associated with various methods of representing the pleasures of 'real life', whereas pleasure 'of' the text is discovered in the literary form. The imperfect, if not erroneous, distinction between form and content, constitutes one of the main methodological techniques for identifying the two major sources of pleasure, and serves as a starting point for the inquiry. This bookdoes not merely offer a personal view of the problem in question, nor an exposition of this problem locked within the limits of a given theory, but a broader perspective consisting of the reflections of academics who critically evaluate both its theoretical and practical aspects, across disciplines such as literary theory and criticism, semiology, philosophy and psychoanalysis"--

The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction PDF Author: Alan Jacobs
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780199831678
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
In recent years, cultural commentators have sounded the alarm about the dire state of reading in America. Americans are not reading enough, they say, or reading the right books, in the right way. In this book, Alan Jacobs argues that, contrary to the doomsayers, reading is alive and well in America. There are millions of devoted readers supporting hundreds of enormous bookstores and online booksellers. Oprah's Book Club is hugely influential, and a recent NEA survey reveals an actual uptick in the reading of literary fiction. Jacobs's interactions with his students and the readers of his own books, however, suggest that many readers lack confidence; they wonder whether they are reading well, with proper focus and attentiveness, with due discretion and discernment. Many have absorbed the puritanical message that reading is, first and foremost, good for you--the intellectual equivalent of eating your Brussels sprouts. For such people, indeed for all readers, Jacobs offers some simple, powerful, and much needed advice: read at whim, read what gives you delight, and do so without shame, whether it be Stephen King or the King James Version of the Bible. In contrast to the more methodical approach of Mortimer Adler's classic How to Read a Book (1940), Jacobs offers an insightful, accessible, and playfully irreverent guide for aspiring readers. Each chapter focuses on one aspect of approaching literary fiction, poetry, or nonfiction, and the book explores everything from the invention of silent reading, reading responsively, rereading, and reading on electronic devices. Invitingly written, with equal measures of wit and erudition, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction will appeal to all readers, whether they be novices looking for direction or old hands seeking to recapture the pleasures of reading they first experienced as children.

An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures

An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures PDF Author: Clarice Lispector
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811230678
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Book Description
Now in paperback, a romantic love story by the great Brazilian writer Lóri, a primary school teacher, is isolated and nervous, comfortable with children but unable to connect to adults. When she meets Ulisses, a professor of philosophy, an opportunity opens: a chance to escape the shipwreck of introspection and embrace the love, including the sexual love, of a man. Her attempt, as Sheila Heti writes in her afterword, is not only “to love and to be loved,” but also “to be worthy of life itself.” Published in 1968, An Apprenticeship is Clarice Lispector’s attempt to reinvent herself following the exhausting effort of her metaphysical masterpiece The Passion According to G. H. Here, in this unconventional love story, she explores the ways in which people try to bridge the gaps between them, and the result, unusual in her work, surprised many readers and became a bestseller. Some appreciated its accessibility; others denounced it as sexist or superficial. To both admirers and critics, the olympian Clarice gave a typically elliptical answer: “I humanized myself,” she said. “The book reflects that.”

The Pleasures of Japanese Literature

The Pleasures of Japanese Literature PDF Author: Donald Keene
Publisher: Companions to Asian Studies Series
ISBN: 9780231067379
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 133

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Book Description
Introduces Japanese culture, and discusses the aesthetics, poetry, fiction, and theater of Japan

The Pleasures of Probability

The Pleasures of Probability PDF Author: Richard Isaac
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 146120819X
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
The ideas of probability are all around us. Lotteries, casino gambling, the al most non-stop polling which seems to mold public policy more and more these are a few of the areas where principles of probability impinge in a direct way on the lives and fortunes of the general public. At a more re moved level there is modern science which uses probability and its offshoots like statistics and the theory of random processes to build mathematical descriptions of the real world. In fact, twentieth-century physics, in embrac ing quantum mechanics, has a world view that is at its core probabilistic in nature, contrary to the deterministic one of classical physics. In addition to all this muscular evidence of the importance of probability ideas it should also be said that probability can be lots of fun. It is a subject where you can start thinking about amusing, interesting, and often difficult problems with very little mathematical background. In this book, I wanted to introduce a reader with at least a fairly decent mathematical background in elementary algebra to this world of probabil ity, to the way of thinking typical of probability, and the kinds of problems to which probability can be applied. I have used examples from a wide variety of fields to motivate the discussion of concepts.

The Pleasures of Reading

The Pleasures of Reading PDF Author: Robert Alter
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393314991
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
A distinguished critic rescues literature from the ivory tower and reestablishes reading as a personal source of complex pleasure and insight.

The Pleasures of Children's Literature

The Pleasures of Children's Literature PDF Author: Perry Nodelman
Publisher: Pearson College Division
ISBN: 9780801332487
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Offers an overview of children's literature in the context of professional discussion of children's literature and reading. Focusing on controversial issues and designed to provoke thought and debate, this text examines literary response to and analysis of the field of literary texts written by adults for children.

The Pleasures of the Text

The Pleasures of the Text PDF Author: Elizabeth Locey
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742515277
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
Why was Violette Leduc's 1954 novel ThZr_se et Isabelle not published in its entirety until November 2000? Under threat of scandal and obsenity charges, French publisher Gallimard withheld the novel, but Leduc continued to write of her life as a woman writer in wartime Paris, frankly depicting her own and imagined lesbian experiences. Mentored by Simone de Beauvoir and a contemporary of French twentieth-century luminaries Sartre, Camus, Genet, and Cocteau, Leduc is, however, known best as France's great unknown writer. In The Pleasures of the Text, Elizabeth Locey restores Leduc to her rightful place in the canon, bringing to light her singular and important contributions to contemporary literary theory. Locey reads Leduc's works from the perspective of reader seduction, which erodes the divide between body and text. Situating Leduc within a continuum with Emma Bovary and Roland Barthes at its extremes, Locey investigates Leduc's use of the erotic touch, look, and voice to seduce her readers. More than an accessible introduction to an overlooked writer, The Pleasures of the Text confronts and challenges the philosophical debate between pornography and erotica and pins down some of the often slippery ways pleasure is mapped onto the body of the reader.

Futile Pleasures

Futile Pleasures PDF Author: Corey McEleney
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823272672
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Honorable Mention, 2018 MLA Prize for a First Book Against the defensive backdrop of countless apologetic justifications for the value of literature and the humanities, Futile Pleasures reframes the current conversation by returning to the literary culture of early modern England, a culture whose defensive posture toward literature rivals and shapes our own. During the Renaissance, poets justified the value of their work on the basis of the notion that the purpose of poetry is to please and instruct, that it must be both delightful and useful. At the same time, many of these writers faced the possibility that the pleasures of literature may be in conflict with the demand to be useful and valuable. Analyzing the rhetoric of pleasure and the pleasure of rhetoric in texts by William Shakespeare, Roger Ascham, Thomas Nashe, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton, McEleney explores the ambivalence these writers display toward literature’s potential for useless, frivolous vanity. Tracing that ambivalence forward to the modern era, this book also shows how contemporary critics have recapitulated Renaissance humanist ideals about aesthetic value. Against a longstanding tradition that defensively advocates for the redemptive utility of literature, Futile Pleasures both theorizes and performs the queer pleasures of futility. Without ever losing sight of the costs of those pleasures, McEleney argues that playing with futility may be one way of moving beyond the impasses that modern humanists, like their early modern counterparts, have always faced.