Tuesday, September 16, 2008

From Work to Text Summary

From Work to Text, Roland Barthes

I. Intro.
A. language has changing over time
1. change is due to current developments in social reforms
- Marxism, psychoanalysis
2. challenges 19th century thiknking that humans are in control with idea of unconscious
mind (id) and not being in control
3. text comes from structuralism
- guiding principle in how we think of the world-unquestionable truth

B. proposition 1
1. the text is not a definitive object
-work is concrete, therefore text is less substantial
2. text is understood differently over time
- text is dynamic and fluid
- work is more static and concrete

C. proposition 2
1. text cant be easily classified
2. text can't be contained into one specific genre-goes beyond literature
- cant analyze other things (culture, etc.)
- creation of culture istelf as an object of study
3. critical analysis
- don't take appearance, process it
4. epistgemology
- framework for knowledge againsgt a particular context of living


D. proposition 3
1. two levels of meaning-literal and concealed (interpretation)
-text is the principles behind the work, the work is the book (actual words, paragraphs)
- book is literal, text is how one interprets it
2. work is "moderately symbolic", text is "radically symbolic"-lacks closure
- work may congtain metaphors but the text itself conveys an idea through an overall
metaphor
- work is artificial, text is more organic
- work is window through which we view text

E. proposition 4
1. text is plural, meaning is spread out
-instead of allowing for interpretation of its meaning, it leads to an "explosion" of
meaning because its composed of a "web of significance" without an "origin or
destination"

F. proposition 5
1. author is a "guest" at the reading of the text
2. text is without a source

G. proposition 6
1. work is object of a consumption
-text narrows the distance btwn reading and writing by replacing consumption with
collaborative reading
- difficulty comes when one attempts to consume text in a traditional sense-then it
becomes "unreadable" and boring

H. proposition 7
1. pleasure of consumption
- losing oneself in pleasure of reading text literally as a story
2. text should be nothing other than text, not to be taken literally
-all text can do is let someone read what it is saying, if taken literally it is a story



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3 comments:

Unknown said...

Thanks a bunch Jane, You have helped me and my collegue a lot.

Unknown said...

Yess it is useful short points summary,thanks it really helps me and other who study Barthes

Dr. Arunachalam Ramasami said...

Nice outline summary - useful for power point presentation (ppp)