A decade ago, Susan Sontag suggested that rather than an esthetics we need an erotics of art. Roland Barthes has gone some way toward providing this in a slim volume called "The Pleasure of the Text" ["Le plaisir du texte"], a liberated and self-indulgent meditation on the solitary vice of reading. Here, and in the book that immediately preceded it, "S/Z," Barthes demonstrates a renewed suppleness that takes him beyond the limitations of much recent French work of a "structuralist" persuasion, including his own.

Taken together, "The Pleasure of the Text," and "S/Z" force us to notice how much of the most interesting thought today is being carried forward in what we used to call "literary criticism," and how important Barthes's own contribution to redefinition of the field has been….

"The Pleasure of the Text" is consciously an assertive book, Nietzschean in its manner, aiming at...