Roland Barthes Biography and List of Works

French social and literary critic, whose writings on semiotics made structuralism one of the leading intellectual movements of the 20th Century. In his lifetime Barthes published seventeen books and numerous articles, many of which were gathered to form collections. His ideas have offered alternatives to the pragmatic and reductionist methods of traditional literary scholarship. Barthes's writings have a considerable following among students and teachers both in and outside France.

"The writer's language is not expected to represent reality, but to signify it. This should impose on critics the duty of using two rigorously distinct methods: one must deal with the writer's realism either as an ideological substance (Marxist themes in Brecht's work, for instance) or as a semiological value (the props, the actors, the music, the colours in Brechtian dramaturgy). The ideal of-course would be to combine these two types of criticism; the mistake which is constantly made is to confuse them: ideology has its methods, and so has semiology."
(from Mythologies, 1957)

Roland Barthes was born in Cherbough, Manche. After his father's death in a naval battle in 1916 and a childhood in Bayonne, Barthes attended the Lycée Montaigne, Paris (1924-30), and Lycée Louis-le-Grand (1930-34). At the Sorbonne he studied classical letters, Greek tragedy, grammar and philology, receiving degrees in classical letters (1939) and grammar and philology (1943).

In 1934 Barthes contracted tuberculosis and he spent the years 1934-35 and 1942-46 in sanatoriums. Numerous relapses with tuberculosis prevented him from carrying out his doctoral research. Barthes was a teacher at lycées in Biarritz (1939), Bayonne (1939-40), Paris (1942-46), at the French Institute, Bucharest, Romania (1948-49), University of Alexandria, Egypt (1949-50), and Direction Générale des Affaires Culturelles (1950-52). In 1952-59 he had research appointments with Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, from 1960 to 1976 he was a director of studies at École Pratique des Hautes Études, in 1967-68 he taught at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and from 1976 to 1980 he was the chair of literary semiology at Collège de France.

LE DEGRÉ ZÉRO DE L'ÉCRITURE, which appeared in 1953, established Barthes as one of leading critics of Modernist literature in France. The work connected him closely with the writers of nouveau roman. He was the first critic to identify the goals of the writings of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Michel Butor. Barthes looked at the historical conditions of literary language and posed the difficulty of a modern practice of writing: committed to language the writer is at once caught up in particular discursive orders.

In MICHELET PAR LUI-MÊME (1954), a biography of Jules Michelet, a 19th-century historian, Barthes focused on Michelet's personal obsessions and saw that they are part of his writing, and give existential reality to the historical moments related by the historian's writing. In MYTHOLOGIES (1957) Barthes used semiological concepts in the analysis of myths and signs in contemporary culture. Barthes's starting point was not in the traditional value judgments and investigation of the author's intentions, but in the text itself as a system of signs, whose underlying structure forms the 'meaning of the work as a whole'.

Barthes's study SUR RACINE (1963) caused some controversy because of its non-scholarly appreciation of Racine. Raymond Picard, a Sorbonne professor and Racine scholar, criticized in his Nouvelle critique ou nouvelle imposture? (1965) the subjective nature of Barthes's essays. Barthes answered in CRITIQUE ET VÉRITÉ (1966), which postulated a 'science of criticism' to replace the 'unversity criticism' perpetuated by Picard and his colleagues. Barthes recommended that criticism become a science.

"I speak in the name of what? Of a function? A body of knowledge? An experience? What do I represent? A scientific capacity? An institution? A service? In fact, I speak only in the name of language: I speak because I have written; writing is represented by its contrary, by speech... For writing can tell the truth on language but not the truth on the real..."
(from Image-Music-Text, 1977)

During his career Barthes published more essays than substantial studies, presenting his views among others in subjective aphorism and not in the form of theoretical postulates. In LE PLASIR DE TEXTE (1973) Barthes developed further his ideas of the personal dimensions in the relationship with the text. Barthes analyzed his desire to read along with his likes, dislikes, and motivations associated with that activity. In S/Z, which appeared in 1970, Barthes made his most intensive aplication of structural linguistics. By analysing phase-by-phase Balzac's short story 'Sarrasine', he dealt with the experience of reading, the relations of the reader as subject to the movement of language in texts. According to Barthes, classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader. But the reader is the space, in which all the multiple aspects of the text meet. A text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. "... the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author." The study has become the focal point and model for 'structuralist' literary criticism because of its analytical concentration on the structural elements that constitute the literary whole.

'One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograph of Napoleon's youngest brother, Jerome, taken in 1852. And I realized then, with an amazement I have not been able to lessen since: "I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor."'
(from Camera Lucinda, 1980)

Barthes's last book was LA CHAMBRE CLAIRE, in which photography is discussed as a communicating medium. It was written in the short space between his mother's death and his own. Barthes died in Paris as the result of a street accident on March 23, 1980. Posthumously published INCIDENTS (1987) revealed the author's homosexuality and secret passions.

For further reading: Roland Barthes by Louis-Jean Calvet (1995); The Barthes Effect by Réda Bensmaïa (1987); La Littérature delon Barthes by Vincent Jouve (1986); Roland Barthes, the Professor of Desire by Steven Ungar (1983); Roland Barthes by Jonathan Culler (1983); Roland Barthes: Structuralism and After by Annette Lavers (1982); Roland Barthes by George R. Wasserman (1981); Under the Sign of Saturn by Susan Sontag (1980); Roland Barthes: A Conservative Estimate by P. Thody (1977); New Criticism in France by S. Doubrovsky (1973); Roland Barthes: Un regard politique sur le signe by L.S. Calvet (1973)

Structuralism: Essential premises are that social and aesthetic phenomena do not have inherent meaning but rather can be sensibly defined only as parts of larger governing systems, and that the true meaning of these phenomena can be revealed only when these larger systems are recognized and understood. Major figures: Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Levi-Strauss.

Semiotics: A study of signs as products of human culture and as means of communication. Central terms: 'signifier' (the form of sign), and 'signified' (the idea expressed). Linked to structuralism: both seek out structures that govern diverse individual expression.

Books by Roland Barthes