John Lurz, Living Literature: Reflexions on the Fantastic Value of "S/Z"

NOVEL THEORY

SPEAKER: John Lurz, Tufts University

This talk asks what it means for us, as students of literature, to see the texts we read within the lives that we live and to see the lives that we live within the texts that we read.  Attempting to approach this question regarding the reflexion of literature and life through the functioning of the signifier rather than through the mirroring of any specific signified, it reworks Roland Barthes’ arguments in S/Z (as well as one of his early discussions of Proust) to explore the common structure of signification by which the intelligibility of both verbal articulation and lived experience is constituted.  The homological relation between word and world that it schematizes hinges on the semiological notion of value, which names a sign’s position in a shifting network of interdependent terms that determine its particular significance, and helps to map the way the operation of a literary text’s signifying system opens up the meaning of the experiences they reflect.  The most striking illustration of this meaningful reflexion revolves around Barthes’ strange treatment of Girodet’s painting Endymion, which he discusses as both an image of the youthful castrato in the narrative of “Sarrasine” and as a real-world painting in the Louvre in a way that weaves the very seam between art and life that his argument diagrams with such subtlety.  The discreet appearance of the Proustian narrator in his explication of Sarrasine as a textual character helps him make a similar point in more verbal and more subjective terms that find their origin in his essay “Proust and Names.” As Barthes’ analyses of Balzac and Proust offer a novel way to literally read and reread one’s life, they ultimately stage a fantastic relation to language itself that illustrates one of the very real values of literary study. 

About the Speaker

John Lurz is Associate Professor in the English Department at Tufts University, where he teaches courses in 20th-century British literature as well as literary theory. He published The Death of the Book: Modernist Novels and the Time of Reading in 2016, and his articles have appeared in journals such as New Literary History, NOVEL, and the James Joyce Quarterly. He is currently completing a book entitled The Barthes Fantastic: Literature, Criticism, and the Practice of Language.