| This study attempts to investigate the elusive notion of "ecriture," a contemporary French philosophico-critical term, on the basis of texts by four authors most prominently associated with it: Maurice Blanchot, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva.;The perennial and translinguistic validity of their thought is tested by a reading of three novels of different historical and national background, generally acknowledged as "world literature": Cervantes' Don Quijote, Dostoevsky's The Idiot and Musil's Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften.;The problematic involved lies at the core of contemporary preoccupations: language. What might seem a "regional" interest of semioticians concerns every walk of life, from the most intimate experience to social organizations. Chapter I deals with "ecriture" as value. In Chapter II I try to differentiate the notion from related terms. In Chapter III key-terms of the four authors are discussed. Chapter IV gives samples of the mechanisms implied. Chapter V shows those mechanisms active in the novels.;To present the twenty-six letters of our phonetic alphabet as a privileged possibility of our modern way of being human seems quixotic in the audio-visual age: it is quixotic and as epistemologically necessary as Don Quijote's "otherness". The sign's value lies in its capacity of illuminating by its infinite combination possibilities the abysses hidden under the appearances of "directly" (re-)presented "reality." The more writing seems old-fashioned, the more it affirms its role in the free exploration of the frontiers of the perceivable and the conceivable. |
