The Ecstasies of Roland Barthes

by Mary Bittner Wiseman

Barthes's writing moves from high modernism to literary structuralism and on to post-modernism and post-structuralism, the ecstasies of the book's title. Post-structuralism rejects structuralism's leaving the structuring subject out of the languages she structures and ignoring its possible meanings, attending only to accepted meanings. The ecstasy lies in the creative reading that both accepts and rejects the accepted meanings. Post-modernism rejects the ideas that a single thread weaves itself through time and the present is inevitably an improvement upon the past. Its ecstasy lies in the viewer's succumbing to the past reality of a photographed object as he privileges this past over the present.

224 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1989