Poststructuralism Texts - S/Z: An Essay by Roland Barthes (1970)

Reading Barthes is like reading love letters to literature. Sure, his language gets a little technical sometimes, and he's still structuralist enough to keep thinking up new ways to categorize what he's doing, but, underneath it all, old Rollie just loves to read. Haven't you ever wanted to take a story apart piece by piece so you could savor every last bit of it?

In his analysis of Sarrasine Sarrasine by Honoré de Balzac in this essay, Barthes divides the novella up into little chunks that show how reading is just as much about re-writing the texts we consume.

Here're some things to consider as you devour: is Barthes putting more into the text than he's pulling out of it? Why is his distinction between "readerly" and "writerly" texts so important?