Roland Barthes

The Reality Effect

Roland Barthes. "The Reality Effect." [Not sure on source]

read with Freedgood 2006 for opposing perspective
structuralist -> poststructuralist
"useless details" as "narrative luxury" that increase the "cost of narrative information"
narrative: predictive, forward moving ("traffic control")
- description: additive, analogical
What are insignificant details doing?
rhetoric of vivid description (hypotyposis)
balance of aesthetic (requiring meaning) and referential (reference to real world external to text) constraints
- the idea of a real referent prevents a spiral into endless detail
the illusion of a referent: if it refers to something real, we don't have access to it
- chair is there not to signify "chair" but to signify reality
sophisticated rhetorical attempts to access reality but knowing they only have words that may refer to only other words