Barthes, Roland

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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).

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