F. Arribert-Narce, F. Endo, K.Pawlikowska (dir.), The Pleasure in/of the Text. About the Joys and Perversities of Reading

Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, New York, Wien, Peter Lang, coll." European Connections", 43, 2021, VI, 170 pp.
ebook pour 49,59 € ( ISBN (ePUB) :     9781789977271
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 Reading is a peculiar kind of experience. Although its practice and theory have a very long tradition, the question of aesthetic pleasure is as perplexing as ever. Why do we read? What exactly thrills us in the text? One of the most prominent scholars having addressed these questions in the twentieth century is undeniably Roland Barthes, who distinguished between the «ordinary» pleasure of reading and bliss (jouissance), a delight so profound that it cannot be expressed in words. Taking his work as a central reference, and revisiting some of his seminal publications on the subject such as Empire of Signs (1970) and The Pleasure of the Text (1973), this collection of essays adopts a similar interdisciplinary approach to explore a broad range of themes and issues related to the notion of readerly enjoyment, between form and content, emotion and reason, and escapist and knowledge-seeking responses to the text: how do literary and ideological pleasures intersect? In what ways do perversions, madness or even fatigue contribute to the pleasure of the text? How do writing and signs, sense and significance, but also image and text interact in the intermedial process of reading? How can paratexts – i.e. the margins of the text, including footnotes – and metatexts play a part in the reader’s enjoyment? 

 Introduction (Fabien Arribert-Narce, Fuhito Endo and Kamila Pawlikowska) - à lire en ligne sur le site de l'éditeur
PART I Perversity, Madness and Projective Reading, at the Margins of the Text: Image and Paratext in Barthes
1 The Perverse Footnote: Roland Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text (1973) and the Politics of Paratextuality (Alex Watson)
2 To Enter Madly into the Image : Reading Projectively in Barthes (Patrick ffrench)
PART II On Pleasure, Fatigue and Death in/of the Text: Textual Exhaustion and Oscillations
3 Pleasure and Fatigue of the Barthesian Text (Kohei kuwada)
4 Genealogy of Textual Necrophilia or Death Drive: Barthes, Freud, De Man and Mehlman (Fuhito endo)
5 Tragicomic Pleasure and Tickling-Teasing Oscillation in John Marston’s Antonio Plays (Krista Bonello Rutter Giappone)
PART III Barthes and Japan, the ‘Empire of Signs’: Signifiance and Undialectical Writing
6 Taking Signs for What They Are: Roland Barthes, Chris Marker and the Pleasure of Texte Japon (Fabien Arribert-Narce)
7 The Barthesian ‘Double Grasp’ in Japan: Reading as Undialectical Writing (Andy Stafford)
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index
Series index 

Fabien Arribert-Narce is Lecturer in French and Comparative Literature at the University of Edinburgh, where his current research focuses on the reception of Japanese culture by French writers and filmmakers since 1970 and on literary and artistic responses to the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
Fuhito Endo is Professor of English Literature at Seikei University, Tokyo. His research specialises in the history of British psychoanalysis and its relationship with contemporary Modernist literature.
Kamila Pawlikowska currently teaches English, sociology and psychology at Rochester Independent College in Kent. Her research interests include images of the human body and face in literature and the visual arts, intercultural communication and global education.