In class I mentioned that Denis Donohue (in his 1981 book Ferocious Alphabets) creates two categories of literary critics: epireaders, who think reading involves imagining a voice in the text, and graphireaders, who see the text as linguistic symbols printed on (or otherwise made visible against) a background. Spoiler alert: Barthes is a graphireader. What advantages do you find in his conception of the written work? Don’t worry about whether you think it is true or not; think instead in a purely utilitarian way — what does it allow us to do, and what does it prevent us from doing?
In the process of announcing the author’s death, Barthes also insists upon a number of other semantic shifts or substitions: writer to scriptor, literature to writing, unity to multiplicity, deciphered to distinguished, and possibly more. Do you see all of these shifts as necessarily connected? In other words, are they all possible only in combination, so that to embrace one change we must accept all of them? If so, why? If not, which shifts are most important or helpful, and how can one adopt them without accepting Barthes’s entire system of thought?
Calvino and Barthes were near-contemporaries (Calvino was a decade younger), and finding evidence of Barthes’s ideas in the books you have read for this course is not particularly difficult. Do so, and then consider how Calvino responds to Barthes’s ideas.