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The Barthes Fantastic
Literature, Criticism, and the Practice of Language
Series: Thinking Literature
Brief Description
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...
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The Barthes Fantastic
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Description
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.
Series: Thinking Literature
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Chinese Whispers examines multiple contact zones between the Anglophone and Sinophone worlds, investigating how poetry both enables and complicates the transpacific production of meaning. In this new book, the noted critic and best-selling author Yunte Huang explores the dynamics of poetry and poetics in the age of globalization, particularly questions of translatability, universality, and risk in the transpacific context. Chinese...Paperback$4799Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 3-4 weeks -
The Barthes Fantastic
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...Paperback$5299Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 3-4 weeks -
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Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9780226839981
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 08 May 2025
Country: United States
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Illustration: 11 halftones
Audience: Professional and scholarly
DIMENSIONS
Spine width: 18.0mm
Width: 152.0mm
Height: 229.0mm
Weight: 313g
Pages: 224
About the Author
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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