Barthes, Roland (1915–1980)

French critic and theorist of semiology, the science of signs and symbols. One of the French ‘new critics’ and an exponent of structuralism, he attacked traditional literary criticism in his first collection of essays, Le Degré zéro de l’écriture/Writing Degree Zero (1953).

Barthes’s main aim was to expose the bourgeois values and ideology he saw as implicit in the seemingly ‘natural’ and innocent language of French literature. For Barthes, a text was not a depiction of the world or the expression of an author’s personality, but a system of signs in which meanings are generated solely by the interplay of these signs.

In Mythologies (1957) he used this structuralist approach to the study of signs in everyday life, looking at such things as toys, advertisements, and wrestling. This and similar studies had a profound influence on the study of popular culture.

Sur Racine/On Racine (1963), S/Z (1970), and The Pleasures of the Text (1970) continued his ever more sophisticated analysis of literary texts. As he became aware of the difficulties inherent in structuralism, his work became more subjective and unorthodox. Roland Barthes sur Roland Barthes (1975) is a highly imaginative autobiography, and Camera Lucida (1980) is both a reflection on photography and an elegy for his dead mother.
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