Writing Degree Zero by Roland Barthes

​As the excellent introduction by Adam Thirlwell writes, French intellectuals in Paris at the particular historical conjuncture were debating the definitions of left-wing literature by its form and content and readership while leaving intact the 'myth' of Literature as a reified, universal and eternal, bourgeois cultural form. 

Barthes takes the myth of Literature as his object of study, contending that Classical forms of writing (the only form of writing due to a unified bourgeois consciousness in writing) disintegrated in 1850s (due to a French revolution of some sort I suppose, my French history isn't so good), from which the writer confronts an inevitable choice, and "there is no Literature without an Ethics of language" (p.6).

Barthes then goes on to trace the various forms that occurred after the dissolution of classical Literature through Flaubert, Maupassant, Camus etc.

As usual I appreciate Barthes' extraordinary abilities to read (eg. his chapter on 'Writing and the Novel' where he analyzes the role of the preiterate tense and third person narration in creating a sphericity, a 'real' artificiality that sustains the novel as a bourgeois institution).

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