A manifesto on literature, Writing Degree Zero is Roland Barthes's first published book and a landmark in his oeuvre. With striking expertise, Barthes surveys the successive trends in the history of French literature to determine, as only few had attempted before, the political and ethical responsibility of the writer. Writing Degree Zero established the young literary genius and ardent critic of bourgeois culture as the leading voice in literary theory. Roland Barthes (1915 -- 1980) was a French literary theorist, philosopher, and critic. He influenced the development of various schools of theory, including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, and post-structuralism. |