Barthes

What stood out to me in the reading was Roland Barthes description of pleasure of the text. Barthes describes our ideal desire and longing for a certain state of ecstasy, which he feels can be brought through text. “Text as pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading” (110). This is the subject material that the majority of people want to have in their lives. They do not want to read about murders and war and people dying because of the depressed feeling that will most likely occur afterwards. Our culture thrives on material that takes us away from our normal, mundane lives and takes us to a place where we can picture ourselves in a place much better. Magazines such as Intouch and Entertainment Weekly captivate readers with their luxurious photographs of celebrities and their boyfriends driving in their expensive cars on their own private island. These images and text serve the ultimate purpose to distract our society from the actual events going on in our world. Readers of these magazines would probably not be so keen enough to buy the magazine if Entertainment Weekly shifted its focus to our depreciating economy and the enormous amount of debt that our country is increasingly falling into. These subject matters fit in Barthes description of “Text as bliss: the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of hi tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis hi relation with language” (110). Ultimately, we live in a society that craves bigger and better living and one way we are able to envision ourselves as living the luxurious lifestyle is through the texts that pursue pleasure.