S/Z

by Roland Barthes, Sündüz Öztürk Kasar (Çevirmen)

Balzac'ın "Sarrasine"inin "esrar"ı, bu kitapta Barthes'ın özgün diliyle yeniden biçimlendiriliyor. İç içe geçmiş öykülerden oluşan bir metin, "S/Z"de sınırlandırılmadan kuşatılıyor. Okur, Balzac'ın karanlık odasında, Barthes'ın kılavuzluğunda düşe kalka bir "gerçeklik" arıyor kendisine. Yapısal çözümleme ve göstergebilim görüngesini tümüyle terketmeden, ruhçözümün yöntemlerini kullandığı "S/Z" ile Balzac'ın puslu öyküsüne yeni bir kapı aralıyor Roland Barthes.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Literary Criticism, Essays, France, Criticism

248 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Roland Barthes of France applied semiology, the study of signs and symbols, to literary and social criticism.

Ideas of Roland Gérard Barthes, a theorist, philosopher, and linguist, explored a diverse range of fields. He influenced the development of schools of theory, including design, anthropology, and poststructuralism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_...

Reviews

[Luís · Rating 4 out of 5]

By analyzing the novel Sarrasine by Balzac, down to the smallest detail, Barthes proceeds to dissect a literary text as only he can. He thus provides a precious lesson in textual interpretation. This book is the result of a two-year seminar (1968-1969) held at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. This in-depth reading provided me with a more precise and realistic understanding of the novel "Sarrasine" by Honoré de Balzac.

[Pony · Rating 4 out of 5]

While this does much to underscore the particular kind of terrorism that is structuralist criticism, Barthes' reading of Balzac's Sarrasine is still a most beautiful insanity, and demonstrates the particular efficacy of the structuralist method exercised to the nth degree.
Allow me some hyperbole: basically, once Barthes finished this, no one else needed to ever again attempt such a thorough structuralist reading. It is more or less the exhaustion point of the method.

[Alok Mishra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Barthes may certainly be termed a giant figure in the world of 'literary theory and criticism'. Nevertheless, his methods are seldom literary. S/Z is a fine example of it. The author (and the theorist) does everything but literary analysis. Brathes' concern is with linguistic analysis and that can never be a perfect or even a considerable way of analysing literature. Culler deems efforts by Barthes and his league as 'extrapolation of literary text' and it is right. Barthes makes it all about looking into what's not said, what's not visible and what could be instead of what is, what was and what is said. However, nothing can reduce the value of this text which serves as a handbook for structuralists and the structuralist school of theory. Barthes attempts to peel the 'onion' of a literary text and reach the centre – which turns out to be the same in every case (as the critics in the structuralist school of the theory believe). Basic codes and binaries are always there. Is it about making the whole body of literature boring? You guess.

[Ian Caveny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another reviewer on Goodreads called S/Z a perfect (yet beautiful) example of "the kind of terrorism that is structuralist criticism." I feel as though this is a vast mis-categorization. Following the pattern of Propp's Morphology of the Folktale, Barthes reveals once and for all that the structuralist method (and I must underscore, as Piaget did, the word "method" here) is suitable for literary criticism. All of the terminologies of the Russian forebears (the Formalists) can be found floating around in Barthes' codes, but each are highlighted in their turn, with the overall product of S/Z being more Freudian, more Lacanian, more Critical Theory than Structuralist in its culmination.

As such, "terrorism" badly fits the reading. Balzac's "Sarrasine" is not obliterated by Barthes' reading. Nor is it actually interpreted. Instead, Barthes simply draws back - as Sarrasine himself does mentally concerning Zambinella's naked figure - the veils of the text so that, perhaps, we might read it for the first time. No detail is left unobserved, no stone left unturned - although I'd have appreciated a stronger nod to the intentionally Gothic tone of the exterior narrative (re: "Ann Radcliffe"). The result is the text itself: Barthes does not give to us a tight, compact "answer" to "Sarrasine"; instead, he reveals all that is at work in "Sarrasine," with the expectation that we, the readers, will take that work and make it into something useful.

In many ways, Barthes' commentary is more post-structuralist than most of his interlocutors read him to be. Here, he is approaching Derrida closer than some think, but holding firmly to the method of structuralism so well exposited by his forebears - Propp, Lévi-Strauss, Piaget. Altogether, it is a masterful work, one that challenges, inspires, and demands response, not just in expanding its methodology, but also in continuing our scholarship on "Sarrasine."

[Michael Dodsworth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I must be honest this was a re-read for me. Barthes's works were pre-eminent when I was navigating my way through university. So encouraged were we to embrace this 'enfant terrible' that I very nearly wrote my PhD on his ideas (in the end it had to be Poe!). Looking back now though there is no doubt that 'The Pleasure of the Text' and 'Death of the Author' and 'S/Z' changed the way that I thought about books: their provenance, the nature of writing, the author and above all the TEXT.

The core of S/Z is a textual analysis of Balzac's short novel 'Sarrasine'. The story of 'Sarrasine' concerns the eponymous young sculptor who falls in love with someone he believes is a woman but who turns out to be a castrato. Sarrasine is killed before he can murder his putative lover for his/her deception. To those of us who had been reared on the Leavisite 'Great Tradition' literary appreciation (there goes that word 'literary' again) which looked at whole texts in their moral and social entirety, S/Z was a bolt from the blue - this was not so much an assessment as a dissection of every line of the story. Key to this is the weight and meaning of every word used by the author. This semiotic approach argues that words carry with them hidden signs that go much deeper than accepted definitions and so penetrates the psyches of the individual reader to the extent that he or she ascribes both intended and unintended meaning to a text. In this way an individual reader may play a part in actually constructing the text and its meaning. Thus when an author chooses a particular word he he is sending both a conscious, and maybe, an unconscious sign to the reader. In effect, he has lost control of parts of his writing. The idea, therefore, behind S/Z is a paradigm of Barthes's notion that the author, as a sole conceiver of a text, is no more. Extended literacy in the last 150 years and the interaction of science and other subjects all feed into what can be brought into play. The rise of genre fiction too, is particularly relevant - the readers of ghost stories, for instance, recognise, impute, rationalise and yes, demand certain elements to be present in their chosen subject.

Not all structural analysis should follow Barthes's 'reductio ad absurdum', of course, but some of the inferences Barthes draws are resonant today, take this passage when La Zambinella (Sarrasine's 'lover') is confronted by a snake:
'he felt her shiver.
"What is wrong? You would kill me" he cried, seeing her grow pale, "If I were even an innocentcause of your slightest unhappiness"
"A snake," she said, pointing to a grass snake which was gliding along a ditch. "I am afraid of those horrid creatures." Sarrasine crushed the snake's head with his heel.'
Barthes comments here are interesting: 'the episode of the snake is the element of a proof whose enthymeme (albeit defective) we know: Women are timid; La Zambinella is timid; La Zambinella is a woman.'

Leaving aside the irony that La Zambinella is a castrato, the inference from the text, which importantly can be read in reverse too, addresses a condescending attitude to women which is causing much debate currently. The signals emanating from just this one incident in the book is indicative of how Barthes tries to draw out underlying assumptions and prejudices that exist in all words. The words we use, and the context in which they are used, assume a vital importance that often we are unaware of.

So these and other books by Barthes, Culler and Derrida established semiotics as a key part of our reception of texts. It has made us much more aware of the fact that a book is saying very much more to us than the author intended or that a superficial reading may imply - we take part in the creation of a work as a vital component, without whom it could not be written. For this legacy and the sheer brilliance and originality of Barthes's reasoning, I award this landmark book five stars.

[Aggeliki Spiliopoulou · Rating 5 out of 5]

Μια μελέτη του Μπάρτ για συγγραφή κριτικής ανάλυσης ενός λογοτεχνικού κειμένου χρησιμοποιώντας ως αντικείμενο το μυθιστόρημα Σαραζίν του Μπαλζάκ.  Έχουμε την λεπτομερή  ανάλυση του κειμένου δίνοντας βάση σε στοιχεία εννοιολογικά,  σημειολογίας, γλωσσολογίας με σκοπό την αποκωδικοποίηση του.

[Nada Elshabrawy · Rating 3 out of 5]

كتاب جميل أفسدته الترجمة. هرجع لقرائته مرة أخرى بين الانجليزي والفرنسي.

[Steven Godin · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Z is the letter of mutilation: phonetically, Z stings like a chastising lash, an avenging insect;
graphically, cast slantwise by the hand across the blank regularity of the page, amid curves of the alphabet, like an oblique and illicit blade, it cuts, slashes, or, as we say in French, Zebras; from a Balzacian viewpoint, this Z (which appers in Balzac's name) is the letter of deviation; finally, here, Z is the first letter of La Zambinella, the inital of castration, so that by this orthographical error committed in the middle of his name, in the center of his body, Sarrasine receives the Zambinellan Z in its true sense—the wound of deficiency. Further, S and Z are in relation of graphological inversion: Sarrasine contemplates in La Zambinella his own castration. Hense the slash (/) confronting the S of SarraSine and teh Z of Zambinella has a panic function: it is the slash of censure, the surface of the mirror, the wall of hallucination, the verge of antithesis, the abstraction of limit, the obliquity of the signifier, the index of the paradigm, hence of meaning."

[sologdin · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fine reading, intense and localized to specifics. The portable, generalizable model ends up at this:

All the enigmas are now disclosed, the vast hermeneutic sentence is closed (all that will continue a little longer is what we might call the metonymic vibration of castration, whose last
waves will disturb the young woman and the narrator). We now know the morphemes (or the "hermeneutemes") of this hermeneutic sentence, this period of truth (in the rhetorical sense). They are: (I) thematization, or an emphasizing of the subject which will be the object of the enigma; (2) proposal, a metalinguistic index which. by signaling in a thousand different ways that an enigma exists, designates the hermeneutic (or enigmatic) genus; (3) formulation of the enigma; (4) promise of an answer (or request for an answer); (5) snare, a pretense which must be defined, if possible, by its circuit of destination (by one character for another, for himself, by the discourse for the reader); (6) equivocation, or double understanding, the mixture in a single statement of a snare and a truth; (7) jamming, acknowledgment of the insolubility of the enigma; (8) suspended answer (after having been begun); (9) partial answer, which consists in stating only one of the features whose total will form the complete identification of the truth; (10) disclosure, decipherment, which is. in the pure enigma (whose model is always the Sphinx's question to Oedipus), a final nomination, the discovery and uttering of the irreversible word. (210)

Good times.

[S · Rating 3 out of 5]

S/Z: ★ ACT. "To critique"; "to dissect"; "to autopsy": the Barthesian text serves as a scalpel and scale with which Barthes qua critic can cut off and weigh the devices, symbols and meanings [SEM. organs; part] of the unfortunate Balzac text "Sarrasine" [SEM. Body; total]. ★★ HER. The pattern of the slasher movie or Thunderdome: a plurality (under guise of simples: Barthes and Balzac; respective texts thereof) enters, a singularity (of pluralities; the readerly) leaves; economic-cultural treatise ["Damn bourgeois!": desire thereof, urging closing of pattern: satisfaction] ★★★ Stars are cool. ★★★★ SEM. "Serrasine", S/Z, Goodreads reviews: the inherent circularity of critique. ★★★★★ REF. Excess of critique and analysis, psychology, post-structuralism/pre-deconstruction [de-con-structurally, not temp-orally], A-literal Frenchness: berets, baguettes, Barthes, Balzac.

[Benjamin Zapata · Rating 4 out of 5]

En un ejercicio irrepetible por su exhaustividad, Barthes se sirve de Sarrasine, una novela corta del buen Balzac, para descomponerla en su totalidad en unidades (frases) que el llama lexias, y a partir de éstas realiza un análisis de sus connotaciones, es decir, de lo que dice el texto. Lo primero a mencionar luego de esto es que Barthes, como buen estructuralista, da sentido al texto desde su totalidad, significada por la pluralidad de lecturas y no de interpretaciones. En ese sentido, es el texto el que, a través de sus frases -del fraseo-, articula su sentido, forma atmósferas y transporta signos que serán leídos bajo ciertos códigos (culturales, psicológicos, retóricos, etc) que darán al texto su unidad connotativa final. Recomiendo ir anotando los conceptos que Barthes propone al inicio del texto para su análisis, ya que luego sólo son nombrados de manera referencial y abreviada, y así no se perderán en su lectura.

Siempre he pensado que el estructuralismo va en paralelo a lo que entiendo por literatura: si bien no se emparenta, la dirección es la misma. En este caso con Barthes, su análisis es tan seductor que me convence por momentos!! De todas formas, lo considero un método clave para entender, por lo menos, la literatura clásica. Así que para quienes les interese tener un acercamiento a la Literatura, entender cómo funciona (al menos desde este paradigma) y lo que significa leer un texto, les dejo mi reseña como una pequeña introducción a este libro.

Funcionalmente, la connotación, al engendrar por principio el doble sentido, altera la pureza de la comunicación: es un "ruido" voluntario, cuidadosamente elaborado, introducido en el diálogo ficticio del autor y el lector, en resumen una contracomunicación (la Literatura es una cacografía intencional).

Me encanta esa definición final entre paréntesis!!

[Chiara Marcelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

Una critica quale atto creativo applicata al testo moderno, che è un testo scrivibile - non fissa cioè il senso, perché il testo è una tensione non un atto.
Barthes prende lo strutturalismo e ne supera i limiti formulando un modello di analisi testuale di Sarrasine geniale ma irreplicabile.

[josh.pdf · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of the most rewarding books I’ve ever read. another one to read again in 20 years. I’m biased because I love Barthes so much already, but this is truly a beautiful, fulfilling, comprehensive text. live love lit crit etc etc (non-coded: suspension)

[Dawson Cole · Rating 4 out of 5]

i cannot stop thinking about how much i prioritize the signifier over the signified and how i'm even doing it right now by reviewing everything i read on a little app for the world to see and assign value <3 so

[Aino · Rating 3 out of 5]

These humanists are trying to kill me

[Czarny Pies · Rating 1 out of 5]

Faute de pouvoir donner cinq etrons, je lui donne une etoile.

Ce livre est evidement une fraude du debut a la fin. A la page 96, il a le culot de dire "ceci n'est pas une explication de texte". Au contraire, c'est exactement ce que c'est "S/Z". Je dirai en plus que c'est une tres bonne explication de texte. Ligne par ligne il decortique le texte de "Sarrasine" une conte de Balzac. Il identifie tous les elements du recit de Balzac. Il demontre avec brio que "Sarrasine" est un chef d'oeuvre, complexe et efficace.

Mais Mon Dieu! Les pretensions de Barthe a etre un critique scientifique et structurelle a trop dure. Au lieu de parler dans un langage litteraire avec des mots et phrases tels que "double entendre", "sous entendre", "fausse piste", "deception", "coup de theatre", etc. , il nous assomme avec ses termes semiotiques et philosophique tels que:: « herméneutique », « proaïrétique » et « sémique ».

Le gout de Barthes a ete excellent et il jugeait bien les oeuvres litteraires mais il vehiculait une methodologie de critique d'une folie absolue.

Vous pouvez lire cet ouvrage et en rire avec plaisir.

[Sor3na · Rating 5 out of 5]

"What evaluation finds is precisely this value: what can be written (rewritten) today: the writerly. Why is the writerly our value? Because the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text. (S/Z: 4)"

[Patrick Fay · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having no education in literary analysis, a fair amount of this went over my head. I had to look up a word almost every other page. In the end, i already loved this story. But I got so much more out of Sarrasine thanks to this book. I developed a deeper appreciation for everything I have read from Balzac.

[Anthony Crupi · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I was an undergrad in the theory-besotted late '80s, there was no bigger power move than to lift S/Z's entire lexia/aperçu gimmick and apply it to just about any text that came to mind. The more specious the application, the better: If you could get away with running Green Eggs and Ham through the S/Z meat grinder, more power to you. It was a look-Ma-no-brains maneuver, one designed to let your entry-level comp lit prof—or, let's be honest here, the grievously overworked and under-motivated TA—know that you were, uh, je connais très bien or whatever with the whole Gallic Thought Gang who terrorized the stateside academe with what some sourpusses would later characterize as an epistemological bout of projectile diarrhea. As an insufferable teen I loved this book for the free pass it [seemed] to issue the laziest amongst us during the whole Foucault/Derrida/Deleuze fun-with-gibberish era; that it no longer packs the same wallop now that I'm old as dirt is perhaps a function of the fact that I no longer have time to dally with this sort of exercise in semantically farting around. ★★½ stars, plus another ½★ for the sheer nostalgic glow of it all.

[Joe Nelis · Rating 2 out of 5]

An undeniably important piece of literary theory. By breaking up Balzac's "Sarrasine" into lexias of varying length, Barthes reveals the way various narrative features and functions weave together to form a cohesive and symbolically resonant experience for readers (though it is not necessary for a reader to be aware of these workings for them to work). A truly fascinating idea. That said, the manner in which it is written (or perhaps translated) is infuriatingly convoluted and confusing. I had to reread several parts of this text simply to glean a partial understanding or to understand how in the world a sentence could have five semicolons (not an exaggeration). It's an important text and it's worth reading, but don't expect to "get it" on the first or second go.

[io · Rating 1 out of 5]

he munched distinctions...

[Quetzalcóatl ML · Rating 4 out of 5]

Aprendí BASTANTE al leer este libro... qué digo leer, consumir sería la palabra adecuada. Lo tuve que leer para la clase de Semiótica. Lo leí y además transcribí todas las ideas principales a la libreta de la clase. A mano. Fue casi una semana para lograrlo, y posiblemente el trabajo universitario "sencillo" más tardado, pero lo recuerdo con muchísimo cariño. De las pocas ocasiones en que no podía acelerar el proceso y aún así disfruté la tardanza. Luego me di cuenta que quizás habría convenido resumirlo en digital, no manual. Pero la verdad es que no se aprende igual lo escrito en teclado que lo escrito a mano. Ah, y cómo detalle acompañante que importó: durante esta actividad con S/Z es cuando comencé a escuchar The Smiths. Gran compañía para una actividad así.

🌟🌟🌟🌟 Excelente libro de ensayo académico. La última estrella la reservo porque aunque hace un trabajo fenomenal en poder explicar todos los conceptos tratados aplicándolos al cuento "Sarrasine" de Honoré de Balzac, sigue sintiéndose incompleto si no acompañamos la lectura de este libro con la del cuento de Balzac constantemente.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Roland Barthes' S/Z provides an in-depth, perhaps over-analyzed, structural literary study of the Balzac short story "Sarrasine" (which I have reviewed separately; the Balzac story can also found in Appendix 1 of S/Z). Influenced by the work of Saussure and Freud, Barthes (like many a critic and academic) finds perhaps more in Balzac than Balzac had ever intended, taking each line and matching it with one or more of five literary/cultural codes. The critic imparts his interpretation on a work, influenced by his own experience, what he has read, etc. The writer, meanwhile -- if he were to read the views of the scholar dissecting his work -- would ask, "Did I really write that?"

[LibrOscar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dentro de todo lo que surge a partir del estructuralismo, la propuesta metodológica de Roland Barthes me resulta muy curiosa por su aparente contradicción: busca expandir los significados de un texto dándole, al mismo tiempo, una estructura. Es una de esas formas de aproximarse a la literatura que, aunque parece rígida, abre una pluralidad de lecturas gracias a la diversidad de voces que pone en juego.

Disfruté mucho el análisis que Barthes hace de Sarrasine y la manera en que aplica su propuesta metodológica para mostrar cómo un texto puede multiplicar sentidos al ser diseccionado.

[Lena · Rating 5 out of 5]

znatelný Barthovo začtení do psychoanalytiků, což mi bohužel připomnělo, že jsem pořád pořádně nepochopila Lacanovo imaginárno. několik pasáží o postavě, který byly citovaný pozdějšíma naratologama, ale u kterejch bych si nebyla tak jistá, že je Barthes vlastně o pár kapitol dál nepopřel. nádherná analogie mezi prací kódu ve vyprávění a tkaním krajky (s.268–269).

[Ayush · Rating 5 out of 5]

Barthes here presents an analysis that is perceptive and acute, and derives a theory of reading that extends structuralism to its limits. A must-read, for the sheer wealth of negative analysis that the book proposes.

[Askorbinka · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was not easy, but really enjoyable for a literature nerd (well, a novice nerd)

[nasim]

a nice look at how a lit critic can systematically review and analyze a narrative line by line

[andreea. · Rating 3 out of 5]

.

[Amelia Hargreaves]

A drag queen??? I am the queen of drag...