...on femininity? Is it universal wisdom? Romantic psychology? We shall never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, of...lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing. No doubt it has always been that way. As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view...

...Fire, Transparent Things, and Look at The Harlequins! 148 Notes 181 Se/ecf bibliography 213 231 Preface 'Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space...lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.' Thus Roland Barthes, in one of contemporary criticism's most famous threnodies, announces...

...texts or at best a Roman de Roland. Yet when he does enter the realm of theory, he is indeed assertive. "Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin," he proclaims in "The Death of the Author," published close to the revolutionary turmoil of May 1968,...

...voice explicitly designing and evaluating the action. Barthes' first point therefore seems correct. "(Writing] is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin (de route voix, de toute origine)." Writing is this destruction — or else it is the invention of...

...the rock. Writing would signify the destruction of Martin's centre because, as Barthes points out, writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is the neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity...

...his discourse in the same way as, say, the writer of a letter. As Roland Barthes exuberantly claims: "Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. ... As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively...

...transcendence of gender. To this extent, A Birthday Book accords with Barthes's sense of writing as "that neutral, composite, oblique space where our...lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing."8 If we "lose" the identity of the "author," then clearly we must also lose a sense of the...

...on femininity? Is it universal wisdom? Romantic psychology? We shall never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, of...lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing. ['The death of the author'] It is time to consider, very briefly, the assault mounted by post-structuralist...

...19). In "The Death of the Author," Barthes described writing as "the destruction of every voice. . . . where our subject slips away, the negative where all...lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing" (Image 142). The impersonalism of the poet in Eliot's theory is expanded in Barthes into the...

...writer dies into the text. Two years later in "The Death of the Author," Barthes similarly suggests that "writing is the destruction of every voice, of...composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing. . . . The voice loses...