Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Semiotics & Theory

The early Twentieth Century produced some of the most exhilarating literature in the English language. Writers from Britain, America and Ireland challenged literary conventions as their perspectives evolved in a dynamic but newly unsettling world.
Social pressures, urbanization, new technologies, and political activism from women's groups and others within the British Empire, all raised the awareness of writers and prompted them to rethink and reshape their work. In addition, intellectual and literary debates from the late nineteenth century lingered into the next century and World War...

A fascinating variety of writing has been produced in the period since the Second World War. Much of this can be helpfully understood by reference to postmodernism. Many important texts in the period, however, are distorted when this label is applied to them, and others are actively anti-postmodernist. Postmodern Literature accessibly defines postmodernism, compares and contrasts it with modernism, and places it in its historical context, especially in relation to crucial phenomena like Auschwitz, the clashing of ideologies, and the prevalence of propaganda and misinformation. It discusses...

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

Preface by Richard Howard. Translated by Richard Miller. This is Barthes's scrupulous literary analysis of Balzac's short story "Sarrasine."

With this book, Barthes offers a broad-ranging meditation on the culture, society, art, literature, language, and iconography--in short, both the sign-oriented realities and fantasies--of Japan itself.