S/Z

S/Z is Roland Barthes's landmark work, published in 1970 and compiled from his lectures at the École Pratique des Hautes Études; it is regarded as the signature text of his shift from structuralism to post-structuralism. The book takes Balzac's novella Sarrasine as its object of dissection: Barthes cuts the story into 561 reading units of varying length, comments on them passage by passage, and identifies five codes interwoven throughout—the hermeneutic code (enigma and answer), the semic code (hints of character and atmosphere), the symbolic code (binary oppositions and their transformations), the proairetic code (the logic of plot sequences), and the cultural code (references to social knowledge). About 93 of the units receive relatively detailed analysis, while the rest are presented as brief annotations, producing a fragmented, open-ended mode of reading that invites addition. In the opening, Barthes proposes the distinction between the "readerly" text and the "writerly" text: the former is a closed, transparent classical work that disguises meaning as nature, while the latter is a modern text in which meaning proliferates and the reader is invited to participate in production. He argues that the realist novel manufactures a "reality effect" through the dense weaving of codes and leads readers to accept the author's authority over meaning; the task of criticism is not to seek a single truth but to show how meaning is made and how it can be rewritten. The slash in the title hints at the mirror relation between Sarrasine and the castrato Zambinella and also figures the rupture of castration and desire. The Chinese translation includes the original text of Sarrasine, an outline of the plot sequence, a "Survey of the Contents of Thought," Bataille's citations on Sarrasine, and a concept index and name index for easy reference while reading. This edition appears in the "Selected Works of Roland Barthes" series and is the third edition published by Shanghai People's Press in 2016.