Sarrasine
Encyclopedia
- For the pipevine, see Aristolochia longaAristolochia longaAristolochia longa is a species of pipevine....
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Sarrasine is a novella written by Honoré de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon....
. It was published in 1830 (the same year as he published La Peau de Chagrin
La Peau de chagrin
La Peau de chagrin is an 1831 novel by French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac . Set in early 19th-century Paris, it tells the story of a young man who finds a magic piece of shagreen that fulfills his every desire. For each wish granted, however, the skin shrinks and consumes a portion of...
), and is part of his Comédie Humaine
La Comédie humaine
La Comédie humaine is the title of Honoré de Balzac's multi-volume collection of interlinked novels and stories depicting French society in the period of the Restoration and the July Monarchy .-Overview:...
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Commentary
Balzac's "Sarrasine" was not paid much attention prior to Roland BarthesRoland Barthes
Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and...
' blow-by-blow structuralist
Structuralism
Structuralism originated in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague and Moscow schools of linguistics. Just as structural linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, structuralism...
/post-structuralist analysis of the text in his book S/Z
S/Z
S/Z, published in 1970, is Roland Barthes's structuralist analysis of "Sarrasine", the short story by Honoré de Balzac. Barthes methodically moves through the text of the story, denoting where and how different codes of meaning function...
, published in 1970. Barthes dissects the text in accordance to five 'codes' (hermeneutic, semic, symbolic, proairetic, cultural).
Text
Project Gutenberg English translation of Sarrasine: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=1826French Wikisource text of Sarrasine http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Sarrasine