Writing Degree Zero (French: Le degré zéro de l'écriture) is a book of literary criticism by Roland Barthes.

[2] In Part Two, Barthes examines various modes of modern writing and criticises French socialist realist writers on the grounds that they typically employ conventional literary tropes that are at odds with their expressed revolutionary convictions.

Barthes quotes a passage from the communist novelist Roger Garaudy and comments: We see that nothing here is given without metaphor, for it must be laboriously borne home to the reader that "it is well written" (that is, that what he is consuming is Literature).

[6] Barthes ends the book on a literally Utopian note: Feeling permanently guilty of its own solitude, it [literary writing] is none the less an imagination eagerly desiring a felicity [bonheur] of words, it hastens towards a dreamed-of language whose freshness, by a kind of ideal anticipation, might portray the perfection of some Adamic world where language would no longer be alienated.

[7]Le degré zéro de l'écriture was translated into English by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith as Writing Degree Zero and published in 1967 by Jonathan Cape.