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S/Z: An Essay
This is Barthes's scrupulous literary analysis of Balzac's short story Sarrasine.
271 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1970
About the author
Roland Barthes
344 books2,352 followersRoland 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_...
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_...
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 104 reviews
May 28, 2022
By analyzing, down to the smallest detail, the novel Sarrasine by Balzac, Barthes proceeds to dissect a literary text as only he is capable of doing. He thus provides a precious lesson in textual interpretation. This book results from a two-year seminar (1968 and 1969) held at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. This in-depth reading gave me a more precise and realistic notion of the novel "Sarrasine" by Honoré de Balzac.
October 22, 2007
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.
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.
April 29, 2022
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.
February 16, 2018
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.
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.
March 24, 2017
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."
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."
January 7, 2021
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.
November 18, 2021
كتاب جميل أفسدته الترجمة. هرجع لقرائته مرة أخرى بين الانجليزي والفرنسي.
March 27, 2021
"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."
April 13, 2022
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.
Barthes prende lo strutturalismo e ne supera i limiti formulando un modello di analisi testuale di Sarrasine geniale ma irreplicabile.
January 9, 2015
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.
October 24, 2020
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)
March 20, 2023
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
February 28, 2023
These humanists are trying to kill me
January 3, 2019
"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)"
February 12, 2022
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.
February 5, 2015
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.
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.
July 2, 2019
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.
August 29, 2013
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.
March 26, 2007
he munched distinctions...
May 30, 2018
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?"
July 16, 2024
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).
December 10, 2023
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.
March 17, 2020
This was not easy, but really enjoyable for a literature nerd (well, a novice nerd)
Read
February 18, 2024a nice look at how a lit critic can systematically review and analyze a narrative line by line
September 22, 2022
вот такую диссертацию хочу.
February 2, 2021
Un libro que envejeció muy bien y muy mal, al mismo tiempo.
July 25, 2015
Où l'on parle à nouveau de "Sarrasine". C'est cette nouvelle de Balzac que Barthes a pris pour sujet de "S/Z" qui se présente comme son analyse intégrale. Barthes fait alterner des paragraphes numérotés en chiffres romains, qui présentent des propositions théoriques ou des bilans d'étape de l'étude, mais qui ne doivent pas être pris comme un découpage en chapitres — à la fin, il propose des tables variées offrant différentes constructions possibles de son travail — et le texte de Balzac découpé en "lexies" et commenté point par point. Si Barthes n'a pas l'espace de faire de la microstylistique, son travail systématique s'appuie sur une méthode clairement définie et proposée, qui n'est pas celle de l'explication universitaire, du moins à la date d'écriture du livre (1969). Cette méthode s'appuie elle-même sur la théorie, clairement développée ici, de l'autonomie du discours : l'oeuvre littéraire est vue comme une production de la langue, une réalisation d'une certaine gamme de ses possibilités, plus que comme le travail délibéré d'un auteur ; ce qui amène Barthes à la fois à relever les contraintes formelles liées à une époque, qu'il n'est pas loin de rejeter comme de coupables lourdeurs, et par la finesse de son explication à montrer la richesse de sens d'un texte d'exception. Tension passionnante : l'étude du texte balzacien permet en fait à Barthes d'interroger la notion de littérature. Ceci dit, c'est la richesse qui l'emporte, et qui permet à Barthes de construire également, avec une admirable rigueur, une interprétation de ce texte particulier, qu'il voit entièrement dominé par la notion (psychologique et médicale) de castration.
April 23, 2011
formula?
this was not easy for me...i think most of it has vanished from my brain....
i'm looking at this paper i wrote for a class...way way back...mr. peabody sent me back in the wayback machine...and i can't for the life of me understand wth i was trying to say, although i suspect at the time, i had some kind of handle on it....
....the paper was trying to imitate S/Z for a critique of faulkner's the hamlet....
heh heh! looks like a got a "d" on the paper.
yeah, best move along.
I've got these SEM...SYM...HER...ACT.....various headings typed in place after each...the paper's paragraphs are numbered...
i'm told that several codes are inconsistent w/barthes....if not vague.......what's going on subversivel?
"you don't have a thorough grasp of barthes or the codes."
and apparently i ran as far as as i could once it was all said and done...
i may as well give it 5 stars, though. i see no reason not too.
this was not easy for me...i think most of it has vanished from my brain....
i'm looking at this paper i wrote for a class...way way back...mr. peabody sent me back in the wayback machine...and i can't for the life of me understand wth i was trying to say, although i suspect at the time, i had some kind of handle on it....
....the paper was trying to imitate S/Z for a critique of faulkner's the hamlet....
heh heh! looks like a got a "d" on the paper.
yeah, best move along.
I've got these SEM...SYM...HER...ACT.....various headings typed in place after each...the paper's paragraphs are numbered...
i'm told that several codes are inconsistent w/barthes....if not vague.......what's going on subversivel?
"you don't have a thorough grasp of barthes or the codes."
and apparently i ran as far as as i could once it was all said and done...
i may as well give it 5 stars, though. i see no reason not too.
July 3, 2022
A readable text on the writable text. Balzac's short story "Sarrasine," as "written" by Roland Barthes.
Probably rather technical for those without a background in literary theory, particularly structuralism. However, much less demanding for a reader than the work of thinkers like Jacques Lacanor Jacques Derrida. Moreover, it should be of particular interest to those who have already read Balzac's "Sarrasine."
Acquired May 24, 1998
Gift from Jenn
Probably rather technical for those without a background in literary theory, particularly structuralism. However, much less demanding for a reader than the work of thinkers like Jacques Lacanor Jacques Derrida. Moreover, it should be of particular interest to those who have already read Balzac's "Sarrasine."
Acquired May 24, 1998
Gift from Jenn
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