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.

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.

A Note on Quotations
Fore-Word

Introduction: On the Fantastic, in Barthes
Chapter 1: Magic Lessons
Chapter 2: How Notation Works
Chapter 3: The Value of Literary Reflexion
Chapter 4: Citation and Its Image
Conclusion: The Wisdom of Criticism

Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index