Roland Barthes
Full Name and Common Aliases
Roland Gérard Barthes, commonly known simply as Roland Barthes, was a towering figure in the fields of literary theory, semiotics, and cultural criticism. His work has left an indelible mark on the way we understand texts, symbols, and the very fabric of culture.
Birth and Death Dates
Roland Barthes was born on November 12, 1915, in Cherbourg, France, and he passed away on March 26, 1980, in Paris, France.
Nationality and Profession(s)
Barthes was a French intellectual whose professional life spanned roles as a literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. His interdisciplinary approach allowed him to traverse and influence various domains of the humanities.
Early Life and Background
Roland Barthes was born into a family with a naval background, but his father died in World War I when Barthes was just an infant. Raised by his mother, Henriette Barthes, in Bayonne, he developed a close bond with her, which would later influence his personal and intellectual life. Barthes was a bright student, attending the Lycée Montaigne and later the Sorbonne, where he studied classical letters. His academic journey was interrupted by recurrent bouts of tuberculosis, which necessitated long stays in sanatoriums. These periods of isolation, however, provided him with ample time to read and reflect, laying the groundwork for his future intellectual pursuits.
Major Accomplishments
Barthes's career was marked by a series of groundbreaking contributions to literary and cultural theory. He was a pioneer in the field of semiotics, the study of signs and symbols as elements of communicative behavior. His ability to dissect and interpret the cultural codes embedded in everyday life was revolutionary. Barthes's tenure at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris was particularly influential, as it was here that he developed many of his key ideas and mentored a new generation of thinkers.
Notable Works or Actions
Among Barthes's most notable works is "Mythologies" (1957), a collection of essays that deconstructs the myths of popular culture, revealing the ideological messages they convey. In "S/Z" (1970), Barthes offers a meticulous analysis of Balzac's novella "Sarrasine," demonstrating his structuralist approach to literature. His book "The Death of the Author" (1967) challenged traditional notions of authorship, arguing that the interpretation of a text should not be limited by the author's intentions. Another seminal work, "Camera Lucida" (1980), explores the nature of photography and its relationship to memory and mourning, reflecting Barthes's personal grief following his mother's death.
Impact and Legacy
Roland Barthes's impact on the humanities is profound and enduring. His theories have influenced a wide array of disciplines, including literature, cultural studies, media studies, and philosophy. Barthes's ideas about the multiplicity of meanings in texts and the role of the reader in creating meaning have reshaped literary criticism and theory. His work laid the foundation for post-structuralism and has been instrumental in the development of contemporary critical theory.
Why They Are Widely Quoted or Remembered
Roland Barthes is widely quoted and remembered for his incisive insights into the nature of language, culture, and society. His ability to unravel the complex web of signs and symbols that constitute our world has made his work a touchstone for scholars and students alike. Barthes's concept of the "death of the author" has become a central tenet in literary theory, encouraging readers to engage with texts in a more active and interpretive manner. His exploration of the everyday myths that shape our understanding of the world continues to resonate, offering a lens through which to critically examine the cultural narratives that surround us. Barthes's legacy endures not only in the academic realm but also in the broader cultural consciousness, as his ideas continue to inspire and provoke thought across generations.
Quotes by Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes's insights on:
In the hierarchy of the major poetic substances, it [plastic] figures as a disgraced material, lost between the effusiveness of rubber and the flat hardness of metal.
That ambiguous area of culture where something unfailingly political, though separate from the political choices of the day, infiltrates judgment and language.
New York is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.
The pleasure of the sentence is to a high degree cultural. The artifact created by rhetors, grammarians, linguists, teachers, writers, parents – this artifact is mimicked in a more or less ludic manner; we are playing with an exceptional object, whose paradox has been articulated by linguistics: immutably structured and yet infinitely renewable: something like chess.
To visit the Tower, then, is to enter into contact not with a historical Sacred, as is the case for the majority of monuments, but rather with a new nature, that of human space: the Tower is not a trace, a souvenir, in short culture; but an immediate consumption of a humanity made natural by that glance which transforms it into space.
A man who wants the truth is never answered save in strong, highly colored images, which nonetheless turn ambiguous, indecisive, once he tries to transform them into signs, as in any manticism, the consulting lover must make his own truth.