I'm curious about how other people actually read this text. I never read Sarrasine before encountering it here, but I decided to hold off reading the fully in tact version until after I read/slogged through Barthes' analysis. Well, at least initially. After about 50 pages of exhaustive (to use Dave's word), tedious code, I got impatient and flipped to the appendix. I read Balzac's story in its entirety and then went back to where I left off. I'm not sure if my "cheating" made much of a difference in how I made sense of things.

I found myself constantly dissecting my own reading method while I was reading. I kept wondering how Barthes intended for us to read his text (or if he had any expectations at all). Did he assume that his readers would be familiar with Sarrasine from the start and that we'd all be re-reading it together, using the appendix only as a reference? Why did he choose to situate the story in the appendix rather than putting it before his analysis?

And while I'm in interrogation mode, couldn't Barthes have chosen a shorter short story to analyze sentence by sentence? Or a poem maybe? Was it even necessary to use a piece of writing this length to get his point across?

Sorry for all of the questions, I've been reading a lot of Judith Butler lately.

- Steph