Tag: Barthes
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Sigal Samuel’s Hermeneutics
In Sigal Samuel’s recent novel The Mystics of Mile End everyone is looking for a message. There’s the Meyer family, with David interpreting the vague murmurs of his erratic heart; his son Lev deciphering the flower caught in his teacher’s bicycle; and his daughter Samara seeking keys to climb the Tree of Life in order to fulfill her Kabbalistic journey. Lev and Samara’s…
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The Millennium Trilogy and Relearning to Read the “Readerly” Text
There was not – if I’m being honest – much thought behind my decision to suddenly drop everything nothing and finally read Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy. Not that I insist on putting too much thought into one’s choice of reading material. In fact, I would call myself a proponent of the spin-around-in-bookshop-and-point strategy of literary selection.…
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why studying literature will break your heart, rot your brain, and destroy all your chances of happiness
Hey – yeah, you there. Did you know that the lover’s discourse is today of an extreme solitude? (1) * Oh, you weren’t aware? Well, maybe you already knew that the whole time you were sitting, alone, at the bar, expecting your date to walk in any minute, you were in fact singing a syntactical…
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S/Z, or, the “if you give a mouse a cookie” of theory
S/Z is the first work of proper “lit’r’y theory” I ever picked up. It was a required course for comp lit majors, and I have my suspicions that this was the first work listed on the syllabus precisely so that we could take the appropriate advantage of drop/add week. Years later, and after having read…
Indirect Libre 