What Turns the Writer into a Great Writer?: The Conversion Narrative of Barthes’s “Vita nova”

This article addresses the status of the conversion narrative that underpins Barthes’s preoccupation in his very late work with a “Vita nova.” It examines his motivation for linking the death of his mother to a conversion that is constructed rhetorically as a singular and sudden event. Barthes’s insistence on a life dramatically broken in two is addressed through his own self-conscious points of reference, from Dante’s “Nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita,” to the “crises” that comically structure the lives of all great writers in Castex and Surer, to the mythically abrupt conversion of the Abbé de Rancé.