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Workshop on S/Z

By Thad Curtz

Break up into groups of exactly five (5) people in order to respond to the following tasks. Appoint someone in the group to be your official timekeeper. They should keep track of the alloted time for each section and remind the group when the time is up for each section. (It's all right if your group needs additional time, but try not to get too far behind.)

Part I (30 minutes)

1. Briefly write about your experience with summer "beach" reading, for example reading something you really like for fun. Write about why you enjoy reading like this, and what the satisfacitons of it are for you.

2. Go around your circle and have each person read what he or she wrote to the group.

3. Unless you're very unusual, you have described your relatioship with what Barthes calls "readerly" texts. Work together and write down a definition of readerly texts and writerly texts. Please make sure you include some discussion of what Barthes calls "gaining access to the magic of the signifier". (p.4)

Part II (20 minutes)

1. Count off from one to five in your group. Work individually for ten minutes to figure out as clearly as you can what Barthes means by one of the codes:

#1 work on the hermaneutic code

#2 work on the semantic code

#3 work on the proairetic code

#4 work on the symbolic code

#5 work on the cultural code

2. Have each person take a turn and explain to the rest of the group the code that they were assigned.

3. Begin talking about this question (we'll come and gather you into a big group sometime soon):

Every time someone uses one of these codes, and every time a reader understands one of them, certain things about how reality works and the relations of language to reality are implied or taken for granted. Work together to try to sort out what you think is implied or taken for granted by each of these codes.

Part III (15 minutes)

Program discussion, questions/answer.

Part IV (15 minutes)

Break

Part V (one hour)

1. Here is a list of some of the themes from S/Z:: The Queen-Woman, Money, Castration, Antithesis, Death, Mirrors, Replication of Bodies.

Work together to make a diagram that has an area dedicated to 4-5 of these themes, and allows you to graphically indicate the network of relations among them. Like this:

2a. First, fill in each area with infomation that will let us all see what you've figured out about:

where and how the theme appears in the story Sarrasine.

where and how the theme appears in our other work for the quarter.

2b. Second, draw links connecting these nodes and label them to show your analysis of how these themes are related to each other.

Part VI (20 minutes)

Bring your drawing back to Lab II 2223, post it on the wall, and take a look at how each of the other groups responded to these questions.