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Roland Barthes (November 12, 1915 - March 25, 1980) was a
French literary critic,
literary and social theorist, philosopher and semiotician. His long productive career reached from the early days of structuralist linguistics in
France up to the peak of post-structuralism, and Barthes's
works are considered key texts of both structuralism and post-structuralism. (Because Barthes was openly gay, some take him as an
antecedent for queer theory as well.) In addition, the autobiographical and
aesthetic qualities of many of Barthes's texts makes them literature in their own right.
In his 1968 essay "The Death of the Author," Barthes made a strong, polemical argument
against the centrality of the figure of the author in literary study. (Michel Foucault's later article "What is an Author?" responded to Barthes's polemic with an analysis of the
social and literary "author-function.")
In his 1971 essay "From Work to Text", Barthes takes this idea further, arguing that
while a 'work' (such as a book or a film) contains meanings that are
unproblematically traceable back to the author (and therefore closed), a text (the same book or film - or whatever) is actually
something that remains open. The resulting concept of intertextuality implies that meaning is brought to a cultural object by its audience and does not
intrinsically reside in the object.
Barthes's book S/Z is often called the masterpiece of structuralist literary criticism. In S/Z, Barthes
dissects the story "Sarrasine" by Honoré de Balzac at length,
proceeding sentence by sentence, assigning each word and sentence to one or several "codes" and levels of meaning within the
story.
Barthes's cultural criticism, published in volumes including Mythologies, is one of the key antecedents for later
cultural studies, the application of techniques of literary and
social criticism to mass culture. Mythologies is a collection of extremely brief, clever analyses of cultural objects
from zoos to museums to fashion (a topic Barthes later took up in detail with The Fashion System).
Some of Barthes's later work, while it remains critical, is also personal and emotional. Most famously, his book Roland
Barthes (often known as Barthes by Barthes) is a theoretical autobiography, organized in alphabetical sections
rather than chronological ones. His last book, Camera Lucida, is
a personal memoir, an epitaph for his mother (and himself), and a study of photography. (Jacques Derrida wrote, in his essay "The Deaths of Roland Barthes," about Camera Lucida that its
"time and tempo accompanied his death as no other book, I believe, has ever kept vigil over its author.")
Works
- A Barthes
Reader
- Camera Lucida
- Critical
Essays
- The Eiffel Tower and other Mythologies
- Elements of
Semiology
- The
Empire of the Signs
- The Fashion
System
- The Grain
of the Voice
- Image-Music-Text
- A Lover's
Discourse. A beautiful and original work that stands somehwere between poetry and criticism. It is considered a novel by
some.
- Michelet
- Mythologies. A particularly pleasant starting point, especially
the famous first (The World of Wrestling) and last (Myth Today) essays.
- New Critical
Essays
- On Racine
- The Pleasure of the Text
- The Responsibility of Forms
- Roland
Barthes (book)
- The
Rustle of Language
- Sade
/Fourier /Loyola
- The
Semiotic Challenge
- S/Z: An Essay
ISBN 0374521670
- Writing Degree
Zero ISBN 0374521395
External links
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