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In The Pleasure of the Text and "S/Z", meanwhile, we find Barthes assigning this work of construction to readers themselves. Here a rather wonderful Barthesian distinction is made between the "readerly" and the "writerly" text. Readerly texts ask little or nothing of their readers; they are smoot…

Barthes' portrait of the prepotent reader

criticism's tendentious politics

To Nabokov, an author was more than a bricolage artiste, more than a recombiner of older materials.

[...] Russell has debated philosophy with Wittgenstein and fiction with Conrad and D. H. Lawrence, he has argued economics with Keynes and civil disobedience with Gandhi, his open letters have provoked Stalin to a reply and Lyndon Johnson to exasperation. [...]