Barthes, Roland

(1915-1980)

   literary critic, semiologist

   A leader in structuralist and semiotic movements, Roland Barthes was born in Cherbourg. After receiving degrees in classical studies and having experience in the theater (Groupe de Théâtre antique de la Sorbonne, 1936), he was, beginning in 1945, influenced by the works of Karl Marx and Jean-Paul Sartre. A reading of albert camus's L'Étranger gave Barthes the idea for a new form of literature, a neutral, or "blanche," style of writing, employing the written text alone. Le Degré zéro de l'écriture (1953), a reflection on literary language and on the historical condition, was a collection of his thoughts on structuralism. This essay can be considered the manifesto of a "new criticism." His works on Michelet (1954), Racine (1963), and on others illustrate this critical approach in which Freudian psychoanalysis plays a large role. Social criticism dominates in Mythologies (1957), a reflection on the myths of daily life through which society accepts as natural the historical results of ideology. These concepts brought Barthes to structural linguistics. Élements de semiologie (1964) and Système de la mode (1967) analyze statements concerning the feminine mode and the "code" that it represents, contributing with a rigorous method borrowed from the Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev to the understanding of the laws of signification. Barthes published a detailed exegesis on a story by honoré de Balzac, which puts forth particularly the theme of sexual ambiguity and castration (S/Z, 1970). Other essays on Sade, Fourier, Loyola (1971), show a growing interest in the significance of the unconscious. Barthes has also written on the group Tel Quel and on Japanese society (L'Empire des signes, 1970). A precursor of critical formalism, Barthes, with five volumes of Essais critiques (1964-84), Le Plaisir du texte (1973), then Roland Barthes par lui-même (1975), avoids being "scientific" so as to give the reader a more humanistic approach (Fragments d'un discours amoureux, 1977). He has also written a meditation on photography (La Chambre claire, 1980), a statement on the rapport between an image and its times. in 1976, Barthes was named to the chair of Literary Semiology at the collège de France.