Going Crazy- Beth (posted 26 October 2005)
Sorry about the title. When I was a senior in college, I took an incredibly challenging Advanced Fiction (writing) seminar. Our professor had us doing "explications" in which we would go through an entire short story and get all of the meaning out of every single word in every single sentence. It was frutrating, mind numbing, and at one point I thought that I was going to have to drop the course, which would mean not completing my English Major and not graduating on time.
Looking back I realize, that we were doing what Barthes did- and in all honesty it made us better readers, writers, and more capabale of critiquing one another's creative works. I'm not defending Barthes, and it is clear that many of you did not like him, I'm just relaying my experiences with this mode of reading/hermenuetical study.
I didn't read Sarrasine until Dave told me that it was there (apparently I didn't read the table of contents either), but when I did I loved it, as it was a STORY- a break from Barthes' intricate commentary. It was the first story that I have read in a long, long time. As far as it goes, I have mixed feelings on Barthes, he probably could have chosen a shorter story and made the same point. But I did enjoy what he had to say, once I began to figure out what the hell he was talking about.
Comments
This an interesting angle, Beth, and comes at one of the main questions we seem to be asking -why Sarrasine? -in perhaps a different way. Would S/Z strike us differently if Barthes had been navigating a poem, rather than a short story/novella? In general, I think, we take the idea of reading poetry word for word much more in stride than doing the same with prose (I don't know what your undergraduate seminar focused on, but in my classes it was generally poetry that was looked at in this way). What does this say about Barthes' view of fiction as such, of ideas of narrative, of the boundaries of genre? Also, does your experience perhaps lend some sort of credence not only to the distinction between readerly/writerly, but (if it is indeed related to Barthes' intricate commentary) to the idea that explication such as S/Z, in a work that is, for me the reader, necessarily a readerly text, can perhaps be some sort of practice or preparation for the experience of the writerly? Can the didactic tone that some of us seem to have identified (with distaste) in S/Z be interpreted as Barthes' (underhand) way of saying that the writerly text is something that we can perhaps not learn, but learn to be open to?
Posted by: Grace ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://reparent.blog.uvm.edu/340/nav-commenters.gif)
at November 1, 2005 10:31 AM
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