The writerly text is a perpetual present, upon which no consequent language (which would inevitably make it past) can be superimposed; the writerly text is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world (the world as function) is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system (Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages. … The systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language. --Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay 5It seems this blog has been designed to trace Sara's ideas about the performativity of language, often times in the literary sense, through poetry and prose but also in theater and oratory using Barthes concept as a guide. The definition of writerly she provides, " text, [that], self-consciously acknowledges its artifice by calling attention to the various rhetorical techniques which produce the illusion of realism," is a clear and concise concept through which to define and shape performative language.
The idea of writerly text, as I understand it and as is directly translated from Barthes scriptible, is analogous to that which is thought of as scriptive, in this case producing a sort of interesting paradox. Sara is approaching her blog from a scriptive perspective and I am looking at her scriptive interpretations in an attempt to "acknowledge [the] artiface" a duty has been already attempted by the author!
That last paragraph was possibly nonsensical. What I can sense through perusing this blog is Sara's journey to better understand and explore the artiface/"reality" of performed language. In reading the blog I myself began to perform a similar academic journey, putting myself in the shoes of someone on that same expedition. Outside of the context of this course, if I was to just stumble upon this blog, it feels like I would attempt to relate to it by trying to image who this person is, which is not true of all blogs. Although there are no directly personal posts and few uses of the "I" pronoun, the sometimes seemingly disparate themes of the posts can only be connected through one person's individual understanding.
In a sense this blog seems to function in the classic tumblr sense- as a moodboard. If Sara continues to expand upon this blog using the aforementioned framework, it seems like it might be a winning scenario for expanding critical readership outside of the performed language that comes first to the conventional mind (plays, monologues, etc).
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