Overview

This study of the writing of Roland Barthes breaks down the divide between lived experience and the language of a literary work. In The Barthes Fantastic, John Lurz explores the intersection of literature and everyday life—and confronts some habits of literary study—through a reading of the work of Roland Barthes. An influential French theorist, Barthes wrote prolifically on the place of language and the play of signs in the ways we produce cultural and aesthetic meaning. Ranging across the entire sweep of Barthes's varied career, Lurz shows how Barthes's insights into signification and literature involve particular intellectual activities that impart significance to the world. Doing so allows him to develop an expanded understanding of the fantastic as a conceptual category—a way of thinking—in which the texts we read come to inform the texture of our real lives. Ultimately, The Barthes Fantastic enlarges our sense of what we learn as students of literature and gives us a new picture of a writer we thought we knew.

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Reviews

“Lurz is to be applauded for his ingenious and subtle account of how literature bleeds into life. His meticulous reading of Barthes attests to the blurred lines between the factual and the fictional and reveals that demystification is only a hair’s breadth away from bewitchment.” * Rita Felski, University of Virginia * “This exquisite book is an invigorating work of highly original scholarship, written in the assured yet never-ponderous voice of a meticulous, attentive, astute literary critic. The Barthes Fantastic moves adroitly between the smallest level of textual detail and the most big-picture questions in literary studies today. In renewing our appreciation of Barthes’s importance and usefulness in our current era, the book brilliantly succeeds in presenting us with a ‘Barthes who, fantastically, seems both the same as and other than the writer that so many of us love.’” * François Proulx, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign * “The Barthes Fantastic makes a vital intervention into the many-sided and often speculative world of Barthes studies with a single claim: Barthes’s critical practice relies heavily on the ‘fantasmatic.’ Original, searching, and forthright in its argument, this book takes us nearer to an understanding of Barthesian notions and finds the deep links between what, or rather how, Barthes is writing and what he is writing about.” * Andy Stafford, University of Leeds *

Author Information

John Lurz is associate professor of English at Tufts University, where he teaches courses in twentieth-century British literature and literary theory.  He is the author of The Death of the Book: Modernist Novels and the Time of Reading. He divides his time between Boston and Hartland, Vermont.

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