Writing Degree Zero probably isn't the easiest text with which to start an acquaintance with Barthes. The book is compact to the point of ellipsis, often arcane. It barely suggests the variety and intellectual mobility of Barthes' subsequent work…. Though explicitly theoretical in character, the argument here can't compare in rigor or completeness with Barthes' later development of some of these ideas in his "Eléments de Sémiologie."… Moreover, Writing Degree Zero gives virtually no indication of Barthes' sensitivity and imaginativeness in handling individual literary texts and in stating the unifying metaphors of a single author's body of work, skills he was to exercise in the short book on Michelet (1954) and in the influential studies of Brecht and Robbe-Grillet written in the mid 1950's. Lastly, the … text doesn't disclose the witty concreteness of Barthes' sensibility, his talent for sensuous phenomenological description, evidenced in the brilliant essay-epiphanies collected in 1957 under the title Mythologies. Thus, Writing Degree Zero is early Barthes, seminal but not representative. (pp. vii-viii)
Writing Degree Zero lends support to the already well-established cause of advanced literature, not with an argument over fundamentals of taste and purpose, but by an allusive refinement of that argument, oriented more to modernist literature's further prospects than to its celebrated past. But Writing Degree Zero is not only manifesto but polemic. With any difficult text, the reader, in order to understand what the philosopher or critic is arguing for, must grasp what or whom he is tacitly arguing against. Considered as a polemic, Barthes is challenging the most intelligent version of the theory of literature's obligation to be socially committed, that theory having always entailed some attack, overt or implicit, on the tradition of modernist literature.
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