I hate posting late…everything you want to say has already been said and it just seems like you’re regurgitating what every other person points out.

Well, I came into to S/Z without having read Sarrasine and like most of the other students I thought no big deal. Ha ha…big deal. I found myself slogging through S/Z and decided that my life would be made a lot easier if I read the story.

I had the same questions as Steph, at least I think it was Steph; I wondered why Barthes chose to analyze this particular story and not something shorter and why he chose to include the story in his own text? It seems to me that Barthes is doing something different here. He must be aware that his readers may not have read Sarrasine and this may be why he includes it in the appendix. I have never come across this before (at least I don’t think I have, I can’t remember) in which a piece of criticism included the critiqued piece in its entirety within the text. This is something I kept thinking about while I was reading S/Z, was this done so that the reader would be able to follow Barthes' analysis?

-Doris the Finkasaurus