Barthes and Love

In the late 1980s a new approach to Barthes begins to emerge, centred around the use of his work to approach the emotional life. Although this is more traditional poetic subject matter, Barthes still inspires innovative and avant-garde approaches. This chapter demonstrates the relevance of Barthes’s work on love to Anne Carson and Deborah Levy, and also shows how his other texts can be applied to these purposes, showing how Kristjana Gunnars uses the more technical Writing Degree Zero to write about grief. The chapter also uses Chris Kraus’s notion of ‘lonely girl phenomenology’ as part of the critical framework with which it approaches alternative creative engagements with theory.