“Reading for Pleasure” suggests a way of drawing the line between what is and what is not theory today. Following Roland Barthes, the author uses her own reading pleasure as a gauge, taking pleasure to be idiosyncratic rather than subjective. Assuming that all types of criticism are driven by a certain kind of pleasure, the essay looks at two genres—that of “exuberant critique” and that of “expansive system-building”—but finds theoretical pleasure only in a third genre: the form of criticism that embraces contradiction and incorporates it into its very practice.
The text of this article is only available as a PDF.
Brown University and differences : A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies
2010
Issue Section:
Articles
You do not currently have access to this content.
