Ebook: The Barthes Effect: The Essay as Reflective Text

Aware that traditional criticism has persisted in seeing the text or genre as a closed form, he argues, for Barthes, that 'meaning must not set too quickly, that the text must not harden into one genre.' In fact, the essay may be the moment of writing before the appearance of genre or, as Barthes himself has suggested, the matrix of all generic possibilities.