From Work To Text: Summary

Roland Barthes’ From Work To Text explores the role and contrasts of “work” and “text” in a changing literary culture. Important to this comparison between previous conceptions of work and text and current conceptions are the schools of thought from which they are emerging: Marxism, Freudianism, and Structuralism. Claiming that these new sociological and psychological conditions, in combination with older disciplines of thought, produce the current interdisciplinary perception of literature. Barthes’ goal in this essay is to illustrate two conceptually different terms that are commonly misunderstood through an explanation of the changes in critical thinking.