“Rare enough is literary criticism that allows a book to live, opens it up and invites its readers to set their own compass.

Kate Briggs’s Exercise in Pathetic Criticism, inspired by her work on Roland Barthes’s last lectures, does just that, and the wealth of possibility contained in Dumas’s Count of Monte Cristo unfolds before us in a mosaic of fragments, which, in their very slightness, shimmer with meaning.”

—Anna-Louise Milne, Cultural Historian, University of London Institute in Paris