Rachel Smith

Marginal Reading

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While reading Roland Barthes, in particular The Rustle of Language, The Preparation of the Novel, and The Neutral, I have been writing and making to think through his ideas. Developing strategies for my own disruptive devotion to reading as writing as making, I use drawing, photography, and writing to tangle association, deletion, and error into my work and research.

 

In ‘Writing Reading’ from The Rustle of Language, Barthes writes an analysis of his own reading process in order to ‘devise a theory of reading’. He describes a reading which is both insolent as it interrupts and smitten as it continually returns to the original text. Here the annotations are smitten as they were produced through a close examination of the text over several readings, yet insolent as the original text is entirely removed.

 

In The Preparation of the Novel, Barthes explores ideas of fragmentation, forgetting, notation, the haiku, and his desire for a short form which notices and writes the present ‘as it is happening to me’ as he circles around the potential of writing his imaginary novel. The following pages present fragments of my own annotations, writing the present, appropriated headings, haiku, and images in search of a haiku form.