Pleasure of the text Farrar, straus & giroux inc (Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc)

What is it that we do when we enjoy a text? What is the pleasure of reading? The French critic and theorist Roland Barthes's answers to these questions constitute "perhaps for the first time in the history of criticism... Not only a poetics of reading... But a much more difficult achievement, an erotics of reading.... Like filings which gather to form a figure in a magnetic field, the parts and pieces here do come together, determined to affirm the pleasure we must take in our reading as against the indifference of (mere) knowledge." --Richard Howard