Writing Degree Zero Research Articles

Is Genre Enough? A Theory of Genre Signaling as Generative AI Rhetoric

ABSTRACT OpenAI’s ChatGPT is a large language model (LLM) that excels at generating text and public controversy. Upon its release, many marveled at its ability to author intelligible and generically responsible texts (Herman). Writing about his students’ experiences using artificial intelligence (AI) writing assistants, S. Scott Graham remarks that the results were “consistently mediocre—and usually quite obvious in their fabrication.” Why might this be true? How can an LLM succeed in some respects and fail in others? We argue that the discrepant reactions to human and AI rhetoric are a question of genre, specifically that AI rhetoric is only generic; AI rhetoric represents a new enactment of “writing degree zero” (Barthes) that is disengaged from immediate rhetorical situations and knowledge bases. AI text generators (currently) have a more difficult time simulating the positioned perspectives that human writers bring to situations and communicate to audiences through their genre usage. Drawing on the work of Bakhtin, we treat this problem as a question of generic form and audience addressivity. We describe the interplay of form and addressivity as genre signaling and offer it as a construct for the analysis of AI rhetoric and genre as a cultural form (Miller). Genre signaling (Hart-Davidson and Omizo) describes a feature of communicative behavior as it occurs over time that can help both humans and machines evaluate written discourse as it exhibits certain stabilized formal features. When texts contain specific genre signals at expected frequencies and intensities, it may be recognized as being generally accurate, reliable, trustworthy. Without these signals, a text with a similar topical focus might fail to be taken as credible or useful. In this essay we propose to quantify genre signaling based on three measures: (1) stability, (2) frequency, and (3) periodicity.

A Circle of Fragments: Barthes, Burgin, and the Interruption of Rhetoric

Roland Barthes’ entire career pursued a dream of being freed from the tyranny of ossified, institutionalized, rote language use, as articulated from his first massively influential work on ‘writing degree zero’ in 1953. The anaemic role of institutional rhetoric and its dusty formulations dulled the capacity for using language and thought otherwise. For Barthes, fragments played a privileged role in the escape from the tyranny of meaning imposed by doxa and received wisdom, sometimes called ‘literature’ and ‘rhetoric’. Barthes once referred to almost all of his writing, and indeed theorizing, as ‘a circle of fragments’. The artist and theorist Victor Burgin has been profoundly influenced by Barthes’ writings and his attempts to escape the ideological constraints of language, institutions and images. His visual rhetorical practice now often takes the form of projection loops that are accessible by gallery attendees at any point in the loop. Their basic building block is also the fragment, and the loop constitutes another circle of fragments. His 2016 work Belledonne uses the time Barthes spent in the sanatorium for tuberculosis treatment as the basis for the piece, its computer-generated imagery and textual intertitles. This article examines Barthes’s writings on pre-Socratic rhetoric, as well as his self-reflexive engagement with his own theorizing, combined with Burgin’s reconsideration of moving image work in gallery or museum spaces as attempts to offer potentially liberatory strategies for eluding rote use and effects of language, image and thought.

Commitment to Degree Zero: Barthes’ First Approaches to the Neutral

This essay links Barthes’ late development on the Neutral in his 1978 Collège de France lecture course to his early reflections on the ‘white’ or ‘neutral’ writing by looking at lesser-known materials: articles published in the sanatorial student journal Existences (1942–4), and in the newspaper Combat (1947–51), as well as how these pieces were integrated into his first book, Writing Degree Zero (1953). I show that Barthes’ first approaches to the ‘neutral’, under the spell of Sartre’s theory of committed literature, both ‘consents’ to the idea of the political responsibility of literature and rejects it, creating a third, crosswise notion of writing that prefigures the recalcitrant force of the Neutral. By exploring the complexities of these early pieces, I argue that some of the unsolved issues will reappear in the Collège de France lecture course, notably the figure of ‘aporia’, and I discuss the ethical implications of this ‘impossibility’.

Entre o neutro e o Grau zero da Escritura: A utopia da linguagem em Roland Barthes

O presente artigo tem como objetivo discutir a concepção da utopia de linguagem em Roland Barthes, bem como sua relação com a noção de Grau zero e Neutro, noções que fazem referência a fenômenos linguísticos que rompem com a estrutura paradigmática e binária da língua. Para tanto, a reflexão sobre a utopia da linguagem em Roland Barthes busca compreender em que medida o autor francês entende forma como valor, vinculando a seu projeto estético uma dimensão ética e política. Nesse percurso, discute-se como Barthes compreende a utopia da linguagem enquanto possibilidade de resistência ao caráter fascista da língua em O grau zero da escrita, O prazer do texto, O rumor da língua, O neutro e Aula. Além disso, comenta-se as relações de sentido possíveis feitas entre O grau zero da escritura e O neutro à luz de comentadores da obra barthesiana que estudam a concepção de linguagem proposta por Barthes, a saber: Jean-Claude Milner, Bernard Comment, Rodrigo Fontanari e Leda Tenório da Mota.

“What's Fragile Is Always New”: The Truth of Literature in Roland Barthes' <em>The Preparation of the Novel</em>

"What's Fragile Is Always New":The Truth of Literature in Roland Barthes' The Preparation of the Novel1 Rudolphus Teeuwen (bio) All theorizing is flight. —Iris Murdoch (1977, 80) On February 16, 1980, Roland Barthes tells the auditors of his Collège de France seminar The Preparation of the Novel II that the summer before, on August 29, 1979, he read Pascal on the plane to Biarritz (near Urt where he had a summer house). He feels "transported" by Pascal's text and thinks to himself, to love literature is, from the moment you start reading, to chase away all possible doubt as to its presentness, its timeliness, its immediacy, it's to believe, it's to see that there's a living man speaking to me as if his body were here, next to mine, more real to me than Komeini or Bokassa; it's Pascal fearing Death, or being overwhelmed by it to the point of vertigo, it's discovering that those old formulations (for example, "Wretchedness of Man," "Concupiscence," etc.) perfectly express the present-day things that are within me, it's not feeling the need for another language → In fact, the present = notion distinct from the topical; the present is alive (I'm in the process of creating it myself) ≠ the topical can only be a noise. (PN II, 2011a, 277)2 [End Page 207] This is Barthes, as it turned out, only days before being hit by a laundry truck, an accident that would lead to his death a month later, age 64, on March 26th. Pascal's old formulation, the "Wretchedness of Man" ("Misère de l'homme"), seems painfully appropriate. Barthes' subjection to the truth he discovered in Pascal's formulation makes for a bitter application of mise en abyme, a form he loved. But there is a happier mise en abyme, an affirmative recursiveness, that Barthes identifies in literature. "Things that are within me" are perfectly expressed by old forms of language and in this way literature affirms its "presentness, its timeliness ("son actualité," Préparation II, 2003, 353), its immediacy." Literature does away with the need for new language: what needs expression already finds a form in it: literature gives us the present, not the topical ("l'actuel," Préparation II, 2003, 353): "l'actuel peut n'être qu'un bruit (Préparation II, 2003, 353).3 Barthes expresses his love for literature's recurrent timeliness as a love for the archaic. Literature "no longer has any currency in the field of letters" (PN II, 2011a, 279) and it is the absence of literature from current collective consciousness that ignites, in Barthes, his love "in the way one loves and embraces something that's going to die" (PN II, 2011a, 277). In The Preparation of the Novel II, it is the death of literature that concerns Barthes, and not in the sense that he wants to do something about it, but in that he wants to partake of it in a way he slowly unfolds in the course. As far back as in Writing Degree Zero (1953) Barthes' most memorable observation about literature already ties it to death: "Literature is like phosphorous: it shines with its maximum brilliance at the moment when it attempts to die" (2012, 38). And in a 1959 essay of barely two pages, "Literature and Metalanguage," French literature "has been for a hundred years a dangerous game with its own death…" (1972, 98). In this early part of his career, it was the avant-garde novel that was tasked with engineering through its own death the destruction of literature and of society in its ordered, durable existence, its horrors of "Terror or plausibility" (2012, 39). Later in his career, when much less in the grip of a theory, Barthes felt confident to declare his tastes in literature as "classical," and as having been so all along. Classical literature to him is not something that lives forever; it is something that dies forever. What makes literature, to Barthes, "classical" is that it offers a reader a "Moment of Truth." Barthes' lecture series The Preparation of the Novel covered two semesters, and his notion of the Moment of...

Literature, Ethics, and Decolonization in Postwar France: The Politics of Disengagement by Daniel Just

Reviewed by: Literature, Ethics, and Decolonization in Postwar France: The Politics of Disengagement by Daniel Just Banu Helvacioglu Just, Daniel. Literature, Ethics, and Decolonization in Postwar France: The Politics of Disengagement. Cambridge University Press, 2015. 217pp. Literature, Ethics, and Decolonization in Postwar France: The Politics of Disengagement analyzes the political and ethical implications of a particular literary style, characterized by “the aesthetics of blankness” and a narrative strategy of “exhaustion,” “weakness,” and “slowness,” that Daniel Just attributes to Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Albert Camus, and Marguerite Duras. Just’s main argument is built upon two axes, the first of which is an analysis of the historical and political setting in France. The second, larger axis comprises a theoretical exploration of language’s indeterminate nature, the relationship between literary forms and politically charged times, and the prevalent view in the mid-1950s that a strong, stable, centered self was the kernel of communicating meaning and that work was the existential mode of relating to others. Just’s historical and theoretical analyses center on Jean Paul Sartre’s changing convictions. He develops his argument in the context of Sartre’s initial emphasis on committed literature in his seminal 1947 essay “What is Literature?” and in his later singular commitment to political action, and rejection of literary writing as work. The theoretical ramifications of Barthes’s Writing Degree Zero, along with Blanchot’s, Camus’s, and Duras’s literary styles, appear “disengaged” in comparison to Sartre’s “committed literature.” Examining the literary responses to Sartre by Barthes, Blanchot, and Camus, Just focuses on the political and intellectual setting of mid-1950s France in the midst of the Algerian War and the role of the French state in the international arena. He also notes the remnants of WWII and the political turmoil of the May 1968 events in France in Duras’s Hiroshima Mon Amour and Destroy, She Said, respectively. At times drawing on works by Stéphane Mallarmé, Georges Bataille, Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Rancière, and Jacques Derrida, Just’s analysis is based on specific criticisms concerning the dichotomy between “literary intransitivity” and “direct political engagement.” Seen from these critical perspectives, Just unhinges the implied associations of disengaged literature from apathetic isolation, slow narrative style from laziness, and the weakness and austerity in novelistic communication from political escapism. This book’s contribution to literary criticism is two-fold. First, it offers a meticulous reading of these authors’ works in an attempt to analyze both the stylistic and thematic elements and the writer’s political and ethical responsibilities. Second, Just problematizes particular dimensions [End Page 190] of disengaged literature in order to emphasize its critically affirmative tendency in ethical terms and its difference in aesthetically defined politics at a time of political turmoil. In Just’s analytical framework, there is an intrinsic bond between the political and ethical. Yet, theoretical arguments fall short in substantiating the claims on ethics and aesthetics. From passing references, one gets the impression that all claims concerning the ethical implications of disengaged literature are based on an operative definition of ethics as the relationship with self and (the absolute otherness of) the other (as evil). The main argument tends to be too eager to draw an ethical unanimity and a forced aesthetic codification among the authors in question. The organization of chapters and the selection of certain texts over others raise some questions. While each author is covered under two separate chapters, in Chapter 1, Barthes’s theory of exhausted literature stands alone, leaving a crucial question unattended: To what extent is the literary style of Barthes’s autobiographical and travel notes compatible with the other authors’ styles? The sole reference to Writing Degree Zero along with Barthes’s other works on photography and film seems to be instrumental in limiting the theoretical debate not only to Barthes’ disagreement with Sartre, but also to his independent stance in relation to Marxists and Structuralists at the time. Just’s emphasis on historicity, which in one instance is presented as an unfortunate coincidence with the publication of Beckett’s Trilogy novels (35), however, fails to acknowledge Barthes’s independence as an author in his own right as Mourning Diary, Empire of...

Our Poets, and A Novel

Our Poets, and A Novel Xiao Kaiyu (bio) Translated by Christopher Lupke (bio) Our Poets When in our indignation Chinese becomes pallid and ossified as in hotels, markets, banks, computers, going through customs, open-bar parties. . . . we, benighted, alien students of Borges, tin-eared impersonators of Rilke’s theism, victims of the gawky translation of Joseph Brodsky’s verse, producers of goose eggs out of Barthes’ Writing Degree Zero, fraudulent drunks who feign lunacy and conceal our spiritual numbness, we curse English. In New York, Paris, and all the meat-eating cities, we chase the dollar, and the endorsement of self-important professors, and we use antiquated Chinese to represent China. Alas, our women govern the home like tyrants, and each and every one of us is as thin as a rope, as plump as a roundworm. Alas, our men are like executioners, plunderers of society. In the deceitful plans of two- and three-room flats, we use roadside gardens that have nothing to do with us and other fabricated scenery crowned by the sun and the moon to signify the desiccation of our brains. We use violence to sing of peace, a last gasp of breath, a frail breeze that blows life afield, we deliver a solemn verdict that it is love. Alas, our poets, our work is nothing but lies! It’s just a little sing-along, officialese. When the functionary dons his uniform to assay realism, meting out praise and critique, young men and young women encircle the politician’s corpse in the square and joyously commemorate the holiday with fireworks and howls; [End Page 76] when the publisher won’t print a single line that is on target, conscience and fantasy reverting to silence and death, we investigate technique. Pure writing scrapes off any possible rancid remnants like picking teeth. (Our innards have long since been shaved clean, of ourselves, there is scarcely anything left to write.) We use hollow language to pen our humiliation. 1995 [End Page 77] A Novel Seeing how you’ve been convicted of a crime, I’ll withhold your name. No one has ever finished reading your novel, as you don’t have the skill to get those peculiar and aggrieved characters to stage a credible fight. And now you’re in prison. Once the villa you built is auctioned off, all your past blunders will be swapped for twenty years of freedom. Now there will be plenty of peaceful evenings propped against the wall, with shame as the headdress for your aching skull. You never imagined they’d catch wind of the ugliest rumor, using it to capture your friendships a day early. In an instant, they propelled you back into the dream world of a luckless novelist and furnished you with a dozen contrary images. When, under the shafts of light split by the prison bar window, you put yourself on trial, arraying a different confession, a novel spreads out before you. The hero wears plain army fatigues, shouting out slogans, boarding a train covered with posters. Midcourse it’s discovered he’s a cheat. He’s purloined the alternative meaning of a sentence. Before reaching maturity he’s already assumed the mantle of a swindler. As for other cheats, his victories came when he began cheating himself: repeatedly going to prison, going to court, spitting. As if he were the hard-nosed hero from an era of falsehood. He was called to the stand wearing an old army uniform in a freshly minted new era, reciting that set of clichéd but increasingly novel contentions. The judge and the courtroom gallery gave a sympathetic wheeze. Actually, these days all he can come up with are word games. Is he a bygone master adept at sophistry? No. He’s just you. You’ve cheated the case, cheated your mother, friends, and yourself, but out of some bizarre logic you’ve withdrawn a fortune, you did it for a hundred villas, because of your faith in a hundred holidays. 1997 [End Page 78] Xiao Kaiyu Xiao Kaiyu was born in the village of Heping, Zhongjiang County, Sichuan Province, in 1960. Beginning in his youth, he was interested in literature and...

“Ex-” in Text: An Excursus in Barthesian Text Theory

The “Ex” of my title leads to a question: can we say that the theory of the text is “history,” or is it still operative, generating methods and protocols that can be reactivated? I survey the evolution of Barthes’s theory of the text, from the seminal essays of Writing Degree Zero and the Tel Quel period to the later essays on Textual Pleasure and Textual Bliss. We will grasp why the theory of the Text ended up undermining itself by its very insistence on the infinite productivity of texts. Text could not be reduced to its signified even though it was crucial to analyze these signifieds, since they were needed to understand the various codes underpinning them. Yet, fundamentally, “Text” brought to the fore a “significance” that both produced it and kept it open. In a last part, I compare Barthes’s trajectory with the more recent analyses of Jacques Rancière in Mute Speech , a book which never mentions the concept of “text.” Rancière resists the allegorical nature of the Barthesian Text. By historicizing texts as much as he can, Rancière follows the periodic and local metamorphoses of these cultural productions without having to hypostasize a “Text.” However, Barthes had paved the way by providing a productive allegory. His concept of an infinite Text contained a Benjaminian allegory: it presented an opaque object that condenses the riddles of history and enhanced the material side of its production.

Os impasses da escrita & o lugar da poesia: uma leitura de "o grau zero da escrita", de Roland Barthes

Despite being usually known by his diversity of interests as well as of theoretical knowledges mobilized by his writing, the work of the French essayist Roland Barthes (1915-1980) keeps a constant which, unlike the aforementioned diversity, remains unexplored even today: the extremely tense and problematic relation with poetry. Tense and problematic because rare are the moments in which Barthes comes to poetry; when it does, he is extremely harsh with it (mainly on Writing Degree Zero). This paper aims to study this relation between Barthes and poetry based on the following hypothesis: these critics on poetry are explained and justified by what Barthes means by modernity (more precisely, such as originally conceived in Writing Degree Zero and resumed in some of his early Essays Critical). Thus, knowing what does the critic mean by modernity, as well as which are its demands, it will be possible analyze how modern poetry responds to them according to Barthes.

‘영화쓰기(Cinécriture)’의 영도(零度) - 창작과 비평, 경계의 사이 혹은 월경 / Cine-Writing Degree Zero: Between and Beyond Boundaries in Creation and Criticism

A trans-boundary between creation and criticism: Such an unprecedented consilience is found only in the field of film. This article traces the epic chronicle of convergence between these two different worlds. This genealogy of crossing borders started with the origin of textuality research, “All films can be read”, the main view by early film semiologists. Also, French film critic/director Alexandre Astruc’s notion of “La Camera-Stylo” (camera-pen) was used as an important catalyst in improving trans-boundary movements. Especially the unique aesthetics of “ecriture” (writing) and “grammatographe” by Roland Barthes can be appropriated for the core concept of boundary-crossing because these metaphors traverse a lot of borders, e.g., texts and images. More specifically, Barthes emphasized in Le degree zeri de l’ecriture (Writing Degree Zero) that zero-degree writing can trigger far-reaching, transparent border-crossing, and this is the task of the grammatographer, a scholar who performatively writes the writing of a picture. After that, the term ecriture was extended to the compound word “cinecriture”(cine-writing)by Agnes Varda. At the same time, Nouveau Roman writers worked in cooperation with directors, including Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnais, such that the distance between film and text narrowed. In addition, film journals ? Cahiers du Cinema, Positif, and Filmkritik ? were actually a functioning open space tearing down the boundaries between creationand criticism. Meanwhile, a group of essay filmmakers of the time enriched the conceptual layers of the so-called “Filmkritik-Style” film, using commentaries. Ultimately, these great strandswere dramatically intertwined through German critic/director Harun Farocki. He belongs to the counterculture 68 generation of artists who pursued social revolution through the creation of a more subversive and political avant-garde cinema and the criticism it produced. During and after this period of upheaval, he consistently presented the practices of self-criticism and self-reflexivity in his works to explore trans-bordering degree zero. As an extraordinary role-model for cross-boundary work, he also transcended the boundaries between film and contemporary art and between activism and pure art, as well as between textual critic and visual critic.

From The Neutral: Session of March 11, 1978

OCTOBER 112, Spring 2005, pp. 3–22. © 2005 Columbia University Press. As Barthes had promised in the lecture with which he inaugurated his assumption of the Chair of Literary Semiology at the College de France, he would pursue a “phantasmic teaching,” one based on the “comings and goings of desire, which [the teacher] endlessly presents and represents. I sincerely believe,” he continued, “that at the origins of teaching such as this we must always locate a fantasy, which can vary from year to year.”1 But the fantasy on which Barthes’s penultimate course, “Le Neutre,” is based did not “vary from year to year”; it held steady, rather, over the trajectory that took him from Writing Degree Zero with the zero degree an early version of le neutre, through all the rest of his books. Perhaps its most touching statement is to be found in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, where Barthes traces his mature commitment to this domain back to the impulses of his early childhood, so that even while playing a version of tag in the Luxembourg Gardens, his inclination was to neutralize the exercise of power which rules an opponent “out”:

Ireland Must be Important …

When it came to the choice of an MA course at University College Dublin in 1969, for me and for almost all my friends who had graduated with a BA in English, there was only one real option—Modern English and American Literature. One or two specialists, of course, would choose Old and Middle English or Linguistics, but these were unloved by the bulk of us, who had resented being required to devote what felt like a disproportionate amount of time to them during our undergraduate years. The only other possibility was Anglo-Irish Literature, but this was almost automatically rejected. It consisted, as we perceived it, of uninspiring courses in such matters as Anglo-Irish speech patterns, the Abbey Theatre, short stories, and Nineteenth Century novelists, with even the risk of the dreaded Irish language, remembered with distaste from its compulsory imposition at school, making an appearance. Dullsville, in short. Anyway, Anglo-Irish Literature, as we saw it, was meant for Americans, and mainly Americans took it. No, Modern English and American Literature was where the action and the intellectual stars were. It promised access to the great world, to the world of contemporary and even avant-garde fiction and poetry, of the nascent but already inspiring literary theory—Writing Degree Zero had just appeared in translation in a cheap paperback: I read it with great excitement and without understanding a word— and of political consciousness—an important issue at the time; a world, in short, far removed from the provincialism, narrow perspectives and cultural isolation of our origins. And from these origins we could not get far enough away.

Foutre! Bougre! Ecriture!

Our growing indifference to Roland Barthes's thought suggests that the reactionaries were right after all. What had seemed a stupid complaint during his heyday now, twenty years after his death, proves prophetic: Roland Barthes has nothing to say. Yet it is precisely at a moment when few read Barthes for his ideas, that the complaint seems most foolish, in having imagined that anyone ever read Barthes, ever could read him, just for these. Hadn't Barthes's writing performance, unabashedly flighty, survived several of its intellectual moments during his own lifetime? To state the obvious: Barthes's achievement has always lain in something else, something that, having now outlived the vitality of virtually everything he "had to say," still seduces, fascinates, inspires; and still exasperates, disgusts, enrages. To continue stating the obvious: that something else is the overriding insistence, the inescapable obviousness, of style in his work. When it first intoxicated us, happy drunks hailed it as an audacity, and mean ones censured it as an embarrassment. But what continues to make both responses possible is that his style is never very well covered by the theories that provide the occasion for its display. The comparably outlandish writing performance of Lacan or Derrida has given intellectuals less trouble; in these writers, style may be readily understood to be part of the argument, from the formidable authority of which it derives a serious, a substantial, an inevitable character. (The not so perversely traditional opening of the Ecrits: "le style est l'homme même.") But Barthesian style consistently manages to seem overperformed in relation to its ideas, or what comes to the same thing, undertheorized. At times, particularly in his early work, Barthes goes out of his way to insist that style may never attain to socio-intellectual meaningfulness; this is the case with the bravura pages on style in Writing Degree Zero, pages whose own epigrammatic éclat obviously performs the distinctive "brilliance" of style, even as they make the argument that none of it matters, that style, allied to the body, to the personal mythology of the author, to the "secret" of both, is intrinsically closed to social signification, and as such irrelevant to the assigned intellectual themes of the day--and of the rest of Barthes's text--which are Freedom, Commitment, and Writing. At other times, of course, mainly in late works, Barthes does advance an implicit justification for his style, but one that [End Page 503] is far too general to serve the purpose of an adequate determination. The notion of pleasure in The Pleasure of the Text, for instance, while it certainly accommodates the writing performance in which it is elaborated, never accountsfor the specificity of this performance, in any way that makes the latter seem necessary. A little bit of justification is hardly better than none at all, and indeed, in one sense, it is considerably worse, for such conspicuous "underdetermination" only calls greater attention to the asocial vacancy of style, to its inability to signify or be signified on a socio-intellectual landscape. Thus, though Barthes was by no means the only stylist among his poststructuralist cohort, he is perhaps the only stylothete, the only writer who posits style as a first principle of writing performance, a principle that is, like all aprioris, inarguable, at once unjustifiable and indisputable. Certainly, with Barthes the will to style appears in what is certainly its most radical--its emptiest--manifestation: that of willfulness. He resembles Guido in Fellini's 8 1/2, who has nothing to say, but wants to say it anyway. "I have no other resource but this irony: to speak of the 'nothing to say." 1

Collaboration and Concepts of Authorship

It was not long ago that one prefecture of french culture was reinventing the idea of authorship while another one was trying to kill it off. The New Wave movement and post-structuralism, fundamental opposites in almost every respect, emerged at the same cultural moment. Roland Barthcs's Writing Degree Zero (1953) and François Truffaut's seminal essay in Cahiers du cinéma that instated auteur criticism (the first phase of the New Wave) appeared less than a year apart; the appearance of Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization (1961) coincided with the triumph of New Wave filmmaking; and in the interval between 1966 and 1970, which saw the publication of The Order of Things, Of Grammatology, and S/Z, Jean-Luc Godard, the most iconoclastic of the New Wave critic-directors, released fourteen feature films, including four masterworks. In its classic phase poststructuralism was fixated on the written word, involved disciplined thought inflected by mainstream Continental philosophy, took on itself the burden of refashioning modern European history along Marxist lines, and could be uncompromisingly rectitudinous. The New Wave spoke the language of images, involved a loose and—except for its radical stylistics—rather tame avant-gardism, valued an aleatory, free-form aesthetic over political commitment, assailed mainstream French culture, and championed alternative forms of cultural production such as American popular movies. Yet the teleologies were similar: to inscribe a unique place in the history of authorship. To supplant the biographical author from the textual site, one of the primary motives of poststructuralism, was to make the collective space available for a higher entity, the philosopher-critic who is the author not of individual texts but of textuality, the social meaning of texts. In the same way, in claiming the textual site for a film author—a radical conception for the time—the auteur critics scripted a role for themselves that they would subsequently occupy as film directors.

Collaboration and Concepts of Authorship

It was not long ago that one prefecture of french culture was reinventing the idea of authorship while another one was trying to kill it off. The New Wave movement and post-structuralism, fundamental opposites in almost every respect, emerged at the same cultural moment. Roland Barthcs's Writing Degree Zero (1953) and François Truffaut's seminal essay in Cahiers du cinéma that instated auteur criticism (the first phase of the New Wave) appeared less than a year apart; the appearance of Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization (1961) coincided with the triumph of New Wave filmmaking; and in the interval between 1966 and 1970, which saw the publication of The Order of Things, Of Grammatology, and S/Z, Jean-Luc Godard, the most iconoclastic of the New Wave critic-directors, released fourteen feature films, including four masterworks. In its classic phase poststructuralism was fixated on the written word, involved disciplined thought inflected by mainstream Continental philosophy, took on itself the burden of refashioning modern European history along Marxist lines, and could be uncompromisingly rectitudinous. The New Wave spoke the language of images, involved a loose and—except for its radical stylistics—rather tame avant-gardism, valued an aleatory, free-form aesthetic over political commitment, assailed mainstream French culture, and championed alternative forms of cultural production such as American popular movies. Yet the teleologies were similar: to inscribe a unique place in the history of authorship. To supplant the biographical author from the textual site, one of the primary motives of poststructuralism, was to make the collective space available for a higher entity, the philosopher-critic who is the author not of individual texts but of textuality, the social meaning of texts. In the same way, in claiming the textual site for a film author—a radical conception for the time—the auteur critics scripted a role for themselves that they would subsequently occupy as film directors.

Roland Barthes: a biography

Preliminary Note. Preface: The Genealogical Silence. 1. A Ward of the Nation. 2. A Little Gentleman. 3. In Limbo. 4. Paris - Bucharest. 5. From Alexandria to Writing Degree Zero. . 6. The Theatre Years. 7. The Ecole, At Last. 8. Structures Do Not Take to the Streets. 9. Tel Quel. 10. The College de France. 11. An Unqualifiable Life, A Life without Quality. 12. The 'After Death'. Notes. Bibliography of Roland Barthes. Index.

Robert Coover's 'Writing Degree Zero': "The Magic Poker"

Robert Coover's 'Writing Degree Zero': "The Magic Poker"

Essay Review: Toward a Theory of Literacy

Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Rosalind Horowitz; Essay Review: Toward a Theory of Literacy. Harvard Educational Review 1 April 1984; 54 (1): 88–98. doi: https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.54.1.j790358p17332436 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest Search

Impressionism and Ideology: The State of Recent Genre Film Criticism

Carlos Clarens, Crime Movies. New York : Norton, 1980.351 pp. Stephen Neale. Genre. London : British Film Institute. 1980.74 pp. Eugene Rosow. Born to Lose: The Gangster Film in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. 422 + xv pp. Thomas Schatz. Hollywood Genres: Formulas. Filmmaking, and the Studio System. New York: Random House, 1981.297 + xiv pp. When film study began to mature in the mid-seventies, interest in the narrative film, which had been nurtured a decade earlier by auteurism's enthusiasm for popular film, waned in favor of more formal concerns. Critical interest shifted from the signified of films to the practice of signification, from what a film means to how it produces meaning. Structural film was particularly amenable to such an approach. No longer was film assumed to have an inviol- able meaning ; rather, meaning was now understood to arise from the con- junction of various discursive codes at work in the cinematic text. Auteurs no longer existed apart from such contexts, nor could they acceptably be studied in this manner again; as Roland Barthes had shown, writing degree zero was impossible.1

Roland Barthes's Secret Garden

This article traces the metaphor of the body through all of Barthes's works in order to clarify a further view of Barthes as writer, critic, and reader. Though it is only disclosed in his autobiography as the «manaword» of his vocabulary, it appears as early as Writing Degree Zero in a discussion of 'style' as the literary element that Barthes cannot easily describe or define.