Roland Barthes

Home > People > Literature and the Arts > French Literature: Biographies

Barthes, Roland (1915–80), French literary critic, essayist, and cultural theorist, was born in Cherbourg. His early life was marred by ill health, and he worked intermittently as a teacher and journalist until in 1960 he became a director of studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. His early book Le Degré zéro de l'écriture (Writing Degree Zero, 1953) is a notable response to Sartre on questions of literary style and political commitment. His witty articles on the workings of modern bourgeois ideology in cinema, wrestling, and popular magazines, were collected in Mythologies (1957), together with a more theoretical essay on the analysis of myths that is derived from Saussure. His commitment to structuralism continued in Éléments de sémiologie (Elements of Semiology, 1965), in his analysis of fashion magazines in Système de la mode (The Fashion System, 1967), and in essays proclaiming the ‘death of the author’.

As the scientific pretensions of structuralism came under assault from Derrida and others, Barthes moved into a new phase of more personal and essayistic reflection in his book on Japan, L'Empire des signes (Empire of Signs, 1970), and in his influential study of Balzac's writing, S/Z (1970). In these and later works of his ‘post-structuralist’ period, he emphasises the multiple, open meanings of texts, and the jouissance (sexual bliss) of reading, notably in Le Plaisir du texte (The Pleasure of the Text, 1973). The wistful and fragmentary late works Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975), Fragments d'un discours amoureux (A Lover's Discourse, 1977), and La Chambre claire (Camera Lucida, 1980) mix autobiography and aphorism in a manner remote from the certainties of the 1960s. He was killed by a laundry van while crossing the road near the Collège de France, where he had been a professor since 1976. His influence has been widespread, especially in his defence, partly inspired by Brecht, of modernist experiment against the traditions of realism.

Roland Barthes , 1915–80, French critic. Barthes was one of the founding figures in the theoretical movement centered around the journal Tel Quel. In his earlier works, such as Writing Degree Zero (tr. 1953) and Mythologies (1957, tr. 1972), he argued that literature, like all forms of communication, is essentially a system of signs. As such, he argued that it encodes various ideologies or "myths," to be decoded in terms of its own organizing principles or internal structures. He was strongly influenced by the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, and his ideas, as expressed in works such as S/Z (1970, tr. 1974) and Empire of Signs (1970, tr. 1982), became more eclectic. Barthes has had an enormous influence on American literary theory.

Bibliography: See studies by J. Culler (1983), P. Lombardo (1989), and M. B. Wiseman (1989).

Barthes, Roland (1915–80) French academic, writer and cultural critic. A leading proponent of structuralism and semiotics, his notion of the literary text as a “system of signs” was informed by Ferdinand de Saussure. Perhaps his best-known contribution to literary theory was the notion of the “death of the author”, in which the meaning of a text is generated by the reader, rather than by reference to biographical detail. His diverse works include Writing Degree Zero (1953), Mythologies (1957), S/Z (1970) and Camera Lucida (1980).