Discoursing Love: The writer and X A fictional response to Roland Barthes

Discoursing Love —The Writer and X’ offers a series of microfictions written in response to Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1990 [1978]). In A Lover’s Discourse Barthes seeks to ‘stage an utterance not an analysis ... amorously confronting the other (the loved object), who does not speak’ (3). Likewise I have written short pieces—outbursts, ripostes, manoeuvres—each less than seven hundred words and connected by meditations on love as experienced by a writer towards her lover. Questions include: How does love confront us? Can the emotional complexity of love, and of the loved Other, find voice in language? I have also experimented with structure, using Barthes’ text to frame each story. This project, conceived in collaboration with Dr Shady Cosgrove, is the first stage of an ongoing work concerned with the interplay of theory and creative writing.