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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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A sweeping account of how we are at our most human when we turn away from the pains of the world. Why do we look away from the suffering of others? Why do we cover our faces in shame? Why do we lower our heads in grief? Few gestures are as universal as the averted gaze. Fewer still are as...Paperback$10000Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 2-3 weeks -
Criticism and Truth
A defence and celebration of the discipline of literary studies and its most distinctive practice—close reading. Does literary criticism offer truths about the world? In this book, Jonathan Kramnick explains literary criticism’s distinctive approach to knowledge and its disciplinary rationale by zeroing in on its singular method: close reading. Close reading is the field’s way of pursuing arguments and advancing...Paperback$3799Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 3-4 weeks -
Reading Hegel
Retrieves Hegelian speculative experience for literary theory. The relationship between Hegel and literary theory has for a long time been both contested and paradoxical. On the one hand, "theory" is often sceptical of all that Hegel ostensibly stood for: idealism, systematicity, and identity at the expense of difference. Yet, in spite of itself, literary theory is taken to owe a...Paperback$5699Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 3-4 weeks -
Chinese Whispers
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...Hardback$18899Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 3-4 weeks -
Joy of the Worm
Consulting an extensive archive of early modern literature, Joy of the Worm asserts that voluntary death in literature is not always a matter of tragedy. In this study, Drew Daniel identifies a surprisingly common aesthetic attitude that he calls “joy of the worm,” after Cleopatra’s embrace of the deadly asp in Shakespeare’s play—a pattern where voluntary death is imagined as...Paperback$5699Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 3-4 weeks -
Chinese Whispers
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 -
Throw Yourself Away
Proposes that we can best understand literature's relationship to sex through a renewed focus on masochism. In a series of readings that engage American and European works of fiction, drama, and theory from the late nineteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, critic and playwright Julia Jarcho argues that these works conceive writing itself as masochistic, and masochism as sexuality enacted...Paperback$4799Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 3-4 weeks
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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