Roland Barthes - Text Quotes

7 Sourced Quotes

View all Roland Barthes Quotes
The discourse on the Text should itself be nothing other than text, research, textual activity, since the Text is that social space which leaves no language safe, outside, nor any subject of the enunciation in position as judge, master, analyst, confessor, decoder. The theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing.

Roland Barthes
Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signifier, to close the writing.

Roland Barthes
A work has two levels of meaning: literal and concealed.
A Text, on the other hand is engaged in a movement … a deferral … a dilation of meaning … the play of signification.
Metonymy — the association of part to whole — characterized the logic of the Text.
In this sense the Text is "radically symbolic" and lacks closure.

Roland Barthes
The Text is plural. Which is not simply to say that it has several meanings, but that it accomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible (and not merely an acceptable) plural. The Text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination.

Roland Barthes
The goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer but a producer of the text.

Roland Barthes
Whereas the work is understood to be traceable to a source (through a process of derivation or "filiation"), the Text is without a source — the "author" a mere "guest" at the reading of the Text.

Roland Barthes
The text you write must prove to me that it desires me.

Roland Barthes