"Barthes: A very short introduction" by Jonathan Culler (OUP, 1983)

• "there is nothing more deplorable than the literary practice called, I believe, poetic prose, which consists of using words for the obscure harmonics that resound about them, made up of vague senses in contradiction with the clear meaning" (Sartre, "What is Literature, p.210).
• "Wrestling attracts Barthes for a number of reasons: it is a popular rather than a bourgeois pastime; it prefers scene to narrative, revelling in theatrical signifying gestures; and it is unabashedly artificial, not only in its signs of pain, anger, and distress but even in its outcome: no one would be shocked to learn that the matches are fixed" (p.27)
• "the writer produces 'presumptions of meaning, forms, as if were, and it is the world which fills them'" (p.9/xi of "Essais critiques")
• "The task of literature, Barthes writes in the preface to Essais critique, is not ... to express the unexpressible ... Literature should attempt, rather, 'to unexpress the expressible', to problematize the meanings we automatically confer or assume" (p.44)
• "he takes no interest in poetry ... Barthes associates poetry with symbols, with plenitudes of meaning, with attempts to create motivated rather arbitrary signs ... for him it is prose that experiments with language while poetry attempts to transcend or destroy it" (p.45-46)
• "Barthes seldom takes part in debates he has provoked and in later years he became increasingly 'laxist', as he put it: uncompromising in his own formulations but uninterested in challenging others or in defending his own positions" (p.54)
• "to invent 'post-structuralism' one has to reduce structuralism to a narrow caricature. Much of what was heralded as 'post-structuralist' was in fact already conspicuous in structuralist writings" (p.65)
• "In the 1960s there seemed no reason to try to distinguish structuralism and seminology" (p.66)
• "In order to understand the functioning of the most interesting and innovatory literary works, one must reconstruct the systems of norms they parody, resist, or disrupt" (p.66)
• "Subjectivity is generally imagined as a plenitude with which I encumber the text, but in fact this faked plenitude is only the wake of all the codes that constitute me, so that ultimately my subjectivity has the generality of stereotypes" (p.68)
• "the version of post-structuralism called 'deconstruction' ... characteristically shows how discourses undermine the philosophical presuppositions on which they rely" (p.74)
• "structuralism has devoted much energy to demonstrating that the conscious subject should not be taken as a given and treated as the source of meaning but should rather be seen as the product of cultural forces and social codes that operate through it" (p.78)
• "A naked body is less erotic than the spot 'where the garment leaves gaps' ... Avant-garde techniques, or disruptions of traditional expectations, are more pleasurably startling as gaps in a readable discourse: Flaubert, for example, has 'a way of cutting, of perforating discourse, without rendering it meaningless'" (p.83)
• "boredom ... is a major theoretical category with a role in any theory of reading. If one reads intently every word of a Zola novel, one becomes bored, as one does if one tries to skim through Finnigan's Wake for the plot" (p.84)