SOURCE: Gallop, Jane. “Feminist Criticism and The Pleasure of the Text.” In Critical Essays on Roland Barthes, edited by Diana Knight, pp. 188-201. New York: G. K. Hall, 2000

In the following essay, first published in 1986, Gallop explores Barthes's ideas in The Pleasure of the Text as they relate to feminism, focusing on his association of pleasure with woman and leftist politics.

In 1973 Roland Barthes, the foremost practitioner of structuralist literary criticism, published a book entitled The Pleasure of the Text.¹ It is an attempt to elaborate a theory of the text based on the notion of pleasure rather than, say, structure or cognition or ideology. According to Barthes, pleasure has been radically excluded from criticism, from scientific, serious studies or theories of the text, his own work included, presumably.

The title of the book—The Pleasure of the Text—has in fact a subtly double meaning. Grammatically “of...