Julian Barnes – a cosmopolitan author

Abstract

This paper presents aspects of the work of Julian Barnes from a contemporary cultural perspective, meant to discuss the British writer’s response to the dissolution of meaning in contemporary society. Cosmopolitanism and a critical view towards simulacra are two attitudes that may define a meaningful life, in Barnes’s view. In the novel “England, England” we find challenges to the conventions of the novel as a genre and a discussion of the human costs of the “society as spectacle”. Therefore, the insidious processes of transformation of meaning are exposed by the British writer in “England, England”.