If you have access to this pamphlet then by all means enjoy it. I call this a pamphlet because it is a pamphlet, the actual text being less than 40 pages. One can imagine such incendiary prose being distributed at a Belle Époque coffeehouse, alas 1966 was more Blonde on Blonde or Masculin /Feminin than a curt dismissal of the "old criticism." In fact Dylan or Godard offer a distillation of this metaphysics.

The pamphlet originated in response to a scathing review of Barthes' book on Racine, the reviewer beseeching Barthes and his ilk to employ true and clear language. What results is a manifesto proclaiming the science of literature. There is then some fascinating discussion of irony and somewhere in the mists, I heard the Hammond organ from My Back Pages and thought of a line from Derrida: "The age of the sign is essentially theological."

Early Barthes is so fun because you can just read a whole book in a day!

La primera parte me costó entenderla más que la segunda, pero lo que entendí de ambas me gustó. Además de las reflexiones sobre la nueva crítica literaria, que son por lo que lo tuve que leer, se puede notar el amor de Barthes por la lectura y la crítica en cómo organiza sus oraciones o en las palabras que usa.

Criticism & Truth is Roland Barthes' response to the attack directed not only against him but against all of the "new criticism" in Raymond Picard's pamphlet Nouvelle Critique or Nouvelle Imposture. The few remarks that follow do not concern this polemic, which seems to be more and more a dialogue of deaf people. They relate only to the second part of the book (pp 45-75) in which Roland Barthes gives us a first sketch of the new rhetoric which he has been trying to establish for some years and which he has presented for a restricted audience which follows his seminar at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris.

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