Roland Barthes - Work Quotes

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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 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