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Part I. Perversity, Madness and Projective Reading, at the Margins of the Text: Image and Paratext in Barthes -- The Perverse Footnote: Roland Barthes's The Pleasure of the Text and the Politics of Paratextuality / Alex Watson -- 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 -- Pleasure and Fatigue of the Barthesian Text / Kohei Kuwada -- Genealogy of Textual Necrophilia or Death Drive: Barthes, Freud, De Man, and Mehlman' / Fuhito Endo -- Tragicomic Pleasure and Tickling-Teasing Oscillation, in John Marston's Antonio Plays' / Krista Bonello Rutter -- Part III. Barthes and Japan, the 'Empire of Signs': Signifiance and Undialectical Writing -- Taking Signs for What They Are: Roland Barthes, Chris Marker and the Pleasure of 'Texte Japon' / Fabien Arribert-Narce -- The Barthesian 'Double Grasp': Reading as Undialectical Writing / Andy Stafford "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? Taking the work of Roland Barthes as a central reference, the aim of this collection of essays is to investigate a variety of themes and issues associated with the question of readerly pleasure. Pleasure 'in' the text is related to the content of the text and associated with various methods of representing the pleasures of 'real life', whereas pleasure 'of' the text is discovered in the literary form. The imperfect, if not erroneous, distinction between form and content, constitutes one of the main methodological techniques for identifying the two major sources of pleasure, and serves as a starting point for the inquiry. This bookdoes not merely offer a personal view of the problem in question, nor an exposition of this problem locked within the limits of a given theory, but a broader perspective consisting of the reflections of academics who critically evaluate both its theoretical and practical aspects, across disciplines such as literary theory and criticism, semiology, philosophy and psychoanalysis"--
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