Kate Briggs: Exercise in Pathetic Criticism

‘Exercise in Pathetic Criticism’, the first in a planned series of literary experiments by writer and translator Kate Briggs, is a one-page reconstruction of Alexandre Dumas’ ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ according to the precepts of ‘pathetic criticism’.

The exercise materializes a new form of literary criticism dreamt up by Roland Barthes in his last lecture course at the Collège de France: a mode of affective reading that dares to ruin the literary work “in order to make it live.”