Roland Barthes

Roland Gérard Barthes (/bɑːrt/;^[4] French: [ʁɔlɑ̃ baʁt]; 12 November 1915 – 26 March 1980^[5]) was a French philosopher.

Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes
Born	Roland Gérard Barthes (1915-11-12)12 November 1915 Cherbourg, France
Died	26 March 1980(1980-03-26) (aged 64) Paris, France
Education	University of Paris (BA, MA)
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Continental philosophy Structuralism Semiotics Post-structuralism
Institutions	École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales Collège de France
Main interests	Semiotics (literary semiotics, semiotics of photography, comics semiotics, literary theory), narratology, linguistics
Notable ideas	Structural analysis of narratives[1] Death of the author Writing degree zero Effect of reality
Influences Saussure • Marx • Nietzsche[2] • Freud • Lacan • Sartre • Bataille • Michelet • Valéry • Lyotard
Influenced Jean Baudrillard • Michel Foucault • Julia Kristeva • James Wood • Eric de Kuyper • Philippe-Joseph Salazar • Gérard Genette • Susan Sontag • Benoît Peeters • Stuart Hall[3] Srecko Horvat •
Signature

Life

Roland Barthes was born in 1915 Cherbourg in Normandy. His father was killed during World War I before his first birthday. He was raised by his mother, his aunt and grandmother in Bayonne. Barthes moved to Paris at the age of 11 with his family. Barthes was student in literature from 1935 to 1939 at the Sorbonne.

Career

In 1948, he taught with short-time positions at institutes in France, Romania, and Egypt. Then he studied lexicology and sociology and began to write bi-monthly essays for the magazine Les Lettres Nouvelles, a collection that was published in 1957. Consisting of fifty-four short essays, between 1954–1956, Mythologies were acute reflections of French popular culture ranging from an analysis on soap detergents to a dissection of popular wrestling.^[6] Barthes taught at Middlebury College in 1957 and befriended the English translator of his work, Richard Howard, in New York City.^[7] He taught in his classes at Middlebury. Michelet and Writing Degree Zero were published in France.

Barthes developed his literary criticism with new ideals of textuality and novelistic neutrality. In 1971, he was a professor at the University of Geneva and also taught at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS).

Works

Here are some of his works:

• (1953) Le degré zéro de l'écriture
• (1954) Michelet par lui-même
• (1978) Préface, La Parole Intermédiaire, F. Flahault, Seuil: Paris
• (1980) Recherche de Proust, Editions du Seuil: Paris.
• (1982) Littérature et réalité, Editions du Seuil: Paris.
• (1988) Michelet, Editions du Seuil: Paris.

References

1. Roland Barthes, "Introduction à l'analyse structurale des récits", Communications, 8(1), 1966, pp. 1–27, translated as "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives", in: Roland Barthes, Image–Music–Text, essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath, New York 1977, pp. 79–124.
2. Réda Bensmaïa, The Barthes Effect: The Essay as Reflective Text, University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p. 112 n. 74: "On all these pages [of Le plaisir du texte], Barthes refers directly to Nietzsche whom he quotes, mentions, or "translates" freely."
3. Dunn, Hopeton S. (2014). "A Tribute to Stuart Hall". Critical Arts. 28 (4): 758. doi:10.1080/02560046.2014.929228. ISSN 1992-6049. S2CID 144415843.
4. "Barthes". Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.
5. McQuillan, Martin (2011). Roland Barthes. Macmillan International Higher Education. pp. 10, 29. ISBN 9780230343894.^{[permanent dead link]}
6. Huppatz, D.J. (2011). "Roland Barthes, Mythologies". Design and Culture. 3 (1): 85–100. doi:10.2752/175470810X12863771378833. S2CID 144391627.
7. Richard Howard. "Remembering Roland Barthes," The Nation (20 November 1982): "Mutual friends brought us together in 1957. He came to my door in the summer of that year, disconcerted by his classes at Middlebury (teaching students unaccustomed to a visitor with no English to speak of) and bearing, by way of introduction, a fresh-printed copy of Mythologies. (Michelet and Writing Degree Zero had already been published in France, but he was not yet known in America—not even in most French departments. Middlebury was enterprising.)" Reprinted in Signs in Culture: Roland Barthes Today, edited by Steven Ungar and Betty R. McGraw, University of Iowa Press, 1989, p. 32 (ISBN 0-877-45245-8).

Other websites

• Barthes, Roland. Incidents. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Free Online – UC Press E-Books Collection
• "Elements of Semiology" The first half of the book, from Marxists.com
• Roland Barthes by Philippe Sollers (in French)
• "Roland Barthes and Camera Lucida" by Ron Burnett
• Roland Barthes and Juri Lotman – special issue of Sign Systems Studies 44(3), 2016.