The written trace of a seminar held in the years 1968 and 1969, S/Z is the text which focuses, for me, the strengths and weaknesses of that period in an intellectual form.
It is Barthes's choice of a story to analyse which determines Balzac's place in the title of this paper ["Realism: Balzac and Barthes"] but it would be a mistake to think that Barthes's choice was aleatory. If the immediate occasion for the selection of Balzac's story Sarrasine was an article by Jean Reboul in Cahiers pour l'analyse and some fleeting comments of Bataille's, it is also the case that to analyse a story by Balzac is to engage with traditional Marxist definitions of the novel. Is it not Balzac that Engels praises as the most complete guide to the reality of France in the post-Napoleonic era? Is it not Balzac who functions for Lukács as one of the key figures in the elaboration of the crucial terms for the debate about realism?
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