História da Sexualidade I: A Vontade de Saber by Michel Foucault
Published 1994 · 161 pages · 44,275 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism, History, Politics & Society
How hard is História da Sexualidade I: A Vontade de Saber to read?
História da Sexualidade I: A Vontade de Saber scores 70 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. 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: 66 out of 100
- Foucault uses coined and repurposed terms such as biopower, dispositif and scientia sexualis, plus abstract Latinate French syntax carried into translation. The vocabulary is demanding but far from the invention of Joyce or Pynchon.
- Sentence structure: 68 out of 100
- Long, qualified sentences stack clauses and reversals, with rhetorical questions interrupting the flow. It is dense but more controlled than Henry James.
- Abstraction: 85 out of 100
- The book works at the level of discourse, power and knowledge, with few concrete scenes and only brief historical illustrations of confession, medicine and demography. It sits near Notes from Underground in its idea-driven mode.
- Information density: 74 out of 100
- In under 50,000 words Foucault compresses a historical thesis, a theory of power and the outline of a six-volume project. Nearly every paragraph advances a claim or reverses an assumption.
How História da Sexualidade I: A Vontade de Saber is regarded
História da Sexualidade I: A Vontade de Saber holds a literary regard score of 90 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.