Following the lead of my mentor, I treat Barthes as a manual. If you have to flip through the text, what does it teach you to do?

Anecdote #1. Our class wiki is acting up. Students are suddenly unable to login or save pages. Some can. Some can’t. Some can from one computer, but not from another. It is as if there is an infectious IP address flagging our accounts. How to solve this problem, I ask? “A Lover’s Discourse,” a student says. “Yes. I say. We could do it the instrumental way and check the online mediawiki guide, but instead we will do it the Barthes way. I will use my “insistent” reading to tell me how to fix the wiki.” I still haven’t fixed the wiki.

Anecdote #2.  What is it about academics that cause them to reject consumerism? The passage that returns to me over and over is the one from Pleasure of the Text. What would an aesthetic of the consumer look like? Vered,  forced to stay home today because of an inch of snow, and I went to the grocery store today. “We need chocolate milk,” she said. Chocolate milk is an in house code for soy milk. “There it is!” she noted pointing to the boxes. She was right.

Anecdote #3. I reach for a citation, but I come up with an anecdote. “You call this snow!” I say to the clas.  All of these anecdotes function as citations. The biggest fear writing teachers have is plagarism. Such teachers forget that a citation is an anecdote. Each time we quote, we tell a story that is meaningful. These stories are our relationships with the text. “What wounds me are the forms of the relation,” Barthes writes. We do not teach the relationship. We teach credit. But paying credit is not the same as having a relationship with a citation. Paying credit is a form of respect, true, but also a forced respect. I may not respect you, I may barely know you, but I am being told to write your name down. “I am jealous of the book,” Barthes writes. Teach that as citation. Be jealous of your references.