écriture [ay‐kri‐tewr], the French word for ‘writing’. Where it appears in this form in English texts, it refers to one or more specific senses used by modern French theorists:
(i) writing as style, in Roland Barthes's book Le Degré Zéro de l'écriture (Writing Degree Zero, 1953), which attacks the illusion of a blank or neutral writing on the grounds that all writing has some style or discourse that shapes our view of the world;(ii) writing as an intransitive activity, as proposed in Barthes's later essay ‘écrivains et écrivants’ (‘Writers and Authors’, 1960) which contrasts écrivants writing ‘about’ something for an ulterior purpose with écrivains for whom writing is self‐directed, about itself as language;(iii) writing as différance as opposed to the illusory authenticity of speech (see logocentrism) according to Jacques Derrida's philosophy of deconstruction;(iv)écriture féminine, or specifically gendered women's writing, as conceived by Hélène Cixous, whose works of the 1970s discuss the sense in which women's writing overflows the binary oppositions of patriarchal logic.
