What is it that we do when we enjoy a text? What is the pleasure of reading? The French critic and theorist Roland Barthes’s answers to these questions constitute perhaps for the first time in the history of criticism … not only a poetics of reading … but a much more difficult achievement, an erotics of reading … . Like filings which gather to form a figure in a magnetic field, the parts and pieces here do come together, determined to affirm the pleasure we must take in our reading as against the indifference of (mere) knowledge. –Richard Howard