Roland Barthes: The Proust Variations

Shortlisted for the 2020 R. Gapper book prize This book confronts the singularity of the relationship between two exemplary writers of the last century in order to challenge and to reinvigorate our notions of what art and criticism – literary or otherwise – can do. While it takes Roland Barthes’s encounters with Marcel Proust’s monumental masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu as its specific focus, the implications of its argument are far-reaching. Indeed, the book argues that Barthes’s writ