The Barthes Fantastic Literature, Criticism, and the Practice of Language

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 lifeand confronts some habits of literary studythrough 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 Barthess varied career, Lurz shows how Barthess insights into signification and literature involve particular intellectual activities that impart value and significance to the world. Doing so allows him to develop an expanded understanding of the fantastic as a conceptual categorya way of thinkingin 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.