lurz

In The Barthes Fantastic, John Luers explores the intersection of literature and everyday life through a reading of the work of Roland Barthes.

Luers shows how Barthes' insights 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, and a category in which the texts we read come to inform the texture of our lives.

Ultimately, The Barthes Fantastic enlarges our sense of what we learn as students of literature.

I think that, [laughs] yeah, that's a good...

I was gonna try to summarize it in my own words, and say that...

So I'm not in, I'm not a academic.

And I'd say that w- if you read this book, you get, first of all, you get to see Barthes' thinking, which is, which is very stimulating the way he says things.

Secondly, you get to see your thoughts on the, on other people, on not only on Barthes, but on what other people have said about Barthes.

And I think there's also this sense that it's very practical.

You're talking about, yeah, the prac- you're talking about certain practices, and there's kind of a feeling of how, how do you understand your life? How do you make your life better through literature? [laughs] Tell me.

Yeah, no, I think that's, uh, that's exactly right, and I...

It's interesting that you have a hard time, or that you were sort of wanting to paraphrase and then finding yourself reading the, the blurb on the back of the book, 'cause I spent a lot of time writing the blurb [laughs] on the back of the book.

Oh, did you?

Yeah.

Sometimes it's publisher who writes it, so I didn't know.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So they asked me...

Well, they asked me to do it, so I did it, and I spent a lot of time.

And I sometimes have a hard, not have...

I don't have a hard time, but my, a lot of this book, a lot of the thinking got done sort of on the page, like in the sentences-

Sure.

Sure

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