A Lover's Discourse: Fragments by Roland Barthes

Published 1979 · 61,600 words · about 4 hours at an average pace

How hard is A Lover's Discourse: Fragments to read?

A Lover's Discourse: Fragments scores 73 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 72 out of 100
Semiotic and psychoanalytic vocabulary throughout.
Sentence structure: 68 out of 100
Compressed fragments, elegant but elliptical.
Abstraction: 88 out of 100
Love treated as a system of signs rather than an experience.
Information density: 78 out of 100
Each figure is a dense compression of a whole tradition.

How A Lover's Discourse: Fragments is regarded

A Lover's Discourse: Fragments holds a literary regard score of 83 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

About the author

Roland Barthes