John Lurz

John Lurz is Associate Professor in the English Department at Tufts University. He published The Death of the Book: Modernist Novels and the Time of Reading in 2016, and his new book The Barthes Fantastic: Literature, Criticism, and the Practice of Language will appear from the University of Chicago Press in May 2025.

Contributions

A Secret Practice: Roland Barthes and the Writing of the Visual

In October 2018, I took a research trip to the Fonds Roland Barthes at the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris. I had just started writing a book on Barthes, and I wanted to learn more about the amateur painting and doodling that flits through Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes: for example, an early drawing in marker whose pleasure and stupidity Barthes comments on in the lower left corner