Diana Knight – författare

Roland Barthes (1915-1980) is still considered one of the most significant figures of postwar French thought and remains central to anglophone cultural theory. He is read by academic researchers and students in modern languages, comparative literature, cultural studies, gender studies, media studies, music and visual studies, philosophy and critical theory, as well as attracting more broadly popular interest. This new and very up-to-date collection of essays brings together eighteen well-known specialists of his work - from France, the US, the UK and other European countries - to address the multiple disciplinary strands of his work and the ways he creatively unsettled the boundaries between them.

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. Utopia mediates the supposed phases of Barthes career, just as it mediates the two sides of his work which are often misleadingly separated: his political and ethical concerns (his desire to invent social values for the world), and his creative project of writing. In short, to take detours via hypothetical utopias was Barthes's way of writing the world. Diana knight follows him through the everyday spaces of Mythologies, through euphoric visions of the city, through the semiological and sexual utopias of the `orient', to the metaphorical south-west of his childhood and the writerly, maternal spaces of his late work. The range of texts studied in Barthes and Utopia is unusually wide, and incorporates discussion of the plans for his so-called Vita Nova--Barthes's final, mysterious writing project. Barthes and Utopia takes us to the heart of Barthes's imaginative processes, of his affective world and idiosyncratic value system. But, because Utopia is the meeting point of Barthes's lifelong concern with the relationship between history, language, and sexuality, this study also inserts Barthes's work into larger political and theoretical concerns, in particular into ongoing debates around Orientalism and homosexuality.

This book explores Barthes's 'model of painting' in the context of Balzac's fictional representations of the relation between artists, their models and their works of art. Diana Knight criticises the sexual politics of prostitution and marriage in nineteenth-century France.

This major new study takes issue both with the traditional critical view that Flaubert's central characters are weak and with the approach adopted by a number of contemporary critics who claim that character is deliberately undermined in the interests of non-representational writing. Rather, Dr Knight explores the relationship between the contents of Flaubert's stories and his practice as a writer, thereby reinstating the functional value of character in his work. She shows that essential aspects of Flaubert's aesthetic - the opaqueness of language, stupidity, fascination and reverie as the object of art - depend on the psychological make-up of fictional characters: their pathological relationship to language and reality mirrors Flaubert's conception of the readers' stupefied response to his own stylistic effects and to his wilfully naive stories. Flaubert emerges as a representational writer, but one who is supremely self-conscious of the fictional status of his representations.