Barthes and Utopia: Space, Travel, Writing

Barthes and Utopia explores the central role of utopias throughout the work of Roland Barthes, from demystification to structuralism, from textuality and sexual hedonism to his final preoccupation with love and mourning. Drawing on an unusually wide range of texts, Knight goes to the heart of Barthes's imaginative processes, his affective world, and his idiosyncratic value system. But, because utopia is the meeting point of Barthes's lifelong concern with the relationship between history, language, and sexuality, her study also inserts Barthes's work into larger political and theoretical concerns, in particular into ongoing debates around Orientalism and homosexuality.