Premise: Writing Degree Zero (French: "Le degré zéro de l'écriture" ) is a book of literary criticism by Roland Barthes. First published in 1953, it was Barthes' first full-length book and was intended, as Barthes writes in the introduction, as "no more than an Introduction to what a History of Writing might be."
Hypothesis: Writing Degree Zero was the first piece of literary criticism Barthes wrote.