Roland Barthes, S/Z

Graham Allen (University College Cork)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.5.2.07: French Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Kate Averis (University of Western Australia), Hugo Azerad (University of Cambridge), Patrick ffrench (King's College London), Edward Forman (University of Bristol), Akane Kawakami (Birkbeck, University of London), Siobhán McIlvanney (King's College London), Sinan Richards (King's College London), Tim Unwin (University of Bristol), David Williams (University of Sheffield)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1970

Places

France (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Non-Fiction
- Commentary / Criticism (literary)

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S/Z

is Roland Barthes's most important and certainly his most sustained critical analysis of a literary text. Barthes's study has had a major impact on literary criticism in the English-speaking world (English version,

S/Z

, trans. Richard Miller, New York: Hill and Wang, 1974) despite the fact that its particular mode of critical practice lies outside of any strictly repeatable or imitable model of reading.

S/Z

is also a landmark text within the history of modern literary theory, lying as it does precisely at the borderline between structuralism and post-structuralism. Barthes during the 1960s had been deeply involved in the project to establish a structural analysis of narrative (see “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,”(1) Roland Barthes,

The Semiotic Challenge

,…

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2519 words

Citation: Allen, Graham. "S/Z". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 20 September 2002 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=10346, accessed 23 November 2024.]

Roland Barthes, S/Z

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