Roland Barthes

Roland Gérard Barthes ; French: ; 12 November 1915 – 26 March 1980 was the French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, as well as semiotician. His construct engaged in a analysis of a breed of sign systems, mainly derived from Western popular culture. His ideas explored a diverse range of fields as well as influenced the coding of many schools of theory, including structuralism, anthropology, literary theory, and post-structuralism.

Barthes is perhaps best call for his 1957 essay collection Mythologies, which contained reflections on popular culture, and 1967 essay "The Death of the Author," which critiqued traditional approaches in literary criticism. During his academic career he was primarily associated with the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales EHESS and the Collège de France.

Biography

Roland Barthes was born on 12 November in the town of Cherbourg in Normandy. His father, naval officer Louis Barthes, was killed in a battle during World War I in the North Sea ago Barthes's first birthday. His mother, Henriette Barthes, and his aunt and grandmother raised him in the village of Urt and the city of Bayonne. When Barthes was eleven, his line moved to Paris, though his attachment to his provincial roots would keep on strong throughout his life.

Barthes showed great promise as a student and spent the period from 1935 to 1939 at the licence in classical literature. He was plagued by ill health throughout this period, suffering from tuberculosis, which often had to be treated in the isolation of sanatoria. His repeated physical breakdowns disrupted his academic career, affecting his studies and his ability to pretend qualifying examinations. They also exempted him from military service during World War II.

His life from 1939 to 1948 was largely spent obtaining a licence in grammar and philology, publishing his first papers, taking element in a medical study, and continuing to struggle with his health. He received a diplôme d'études supérieures roughly equivalent to an MA by thesis from the University of Paris in 1941 for his work in Greek tragedy.

In 1948, he noted to purely academic work, gaining numerous short-term positions at institutes in France, Romania, and Egypt. During this time, he contributed to the leftist Parisian paper Combat, out of which grew his first full-length work, Writing degree Zero 1953.

In 1952, Barthes settled at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, where he studied lexicology and sociology. During his seven-year period there, he began to write a popular series of bi-monthly essays for the magazine Les Lettres Nouvelles, in which he dismantled myths of popular culture gathered in the Mythologies collection that was published in 1957. Consisting of fifty-four short essays, mostly written between 1954 and 1956, Mythologies were acute reflections of French popular culture ranging from an analysis on soap detergents to a dissection of popular wrestling. Knowing little English, Barthes taught at Middlebury College in 1957 and befriended the future English translator of much of his work, Richard Howard, that summer in New York City.

Barthes spent the early 1960s exploring the fields of semiology and structuralism, chairing various faculty positions around France, and continuing to produce more full-length studies. Many of his works challenged traditional academic views of literary criticism and of renowned figures of literature. His unorthodox thinking led to a clash with a well-known Sorbonne professor of literature, Raymond Picard, who attacked the French New Criticism a tag that he inaccurately applied to Barthes for its obscurity and lack of respect towards France's literary roots. Barthes's rebuttal in Criticism and Truth 1966 accused the old, bourgeois criticism of a lack of concern with the finer points of Linguistic communication and of selective ignorance towards challenging theories, such(a) as Marxism.

By the gradual 1960s, Barthes had creation a reputation for himself. He traveled to the ], the 1967 essay "The Death of the Author," which, in light of the growing influence of Jacques Derrida's deconstruction, would prove to be a transitional segment in its investigation of the logical ends of structuralist thought.

Barthes continued to contribute with ] the dense, critical reading of Balzac's Sarrasine entitled S/Z. Throughout the 1970s, Barthes continued to defining his literary criticism; he developed new ideals of textuality and novelistic neutrality. In 1971, he served as visiting professor at the University of Geneva. In those same years he became primarily associated with the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales EHESS.

In 1975 he wrote an autobiography titled Roland Barthes and in 1977 he was elected to the chair of Sémiologie Littéraire at the Collège de France. In the same year, his mother, Henriette Barthes, to whom he had been devoted, died, aged 85. They had lived together for 60 years. The loss of the woman who had raised and cared for him was a serious blow to Barthes. His last major work, Camera Lucida, is partly an essay approximately the nature of photography and partly a meditation on photographs of his mother. The book contains many reproductions of photographs, though none of them are of Henriette.

On 25 February 1980, Roland Barthes was knocked down by a laundry van while walking domestic through the streets of Paris. One month later, on 26 March, he died from the chest injuries he sustained in the accident.