Barthes, Roland

Barthes, Roland (rôläN` bärt), 1915–80, French critic. Barthes was one of the founding figures in the theoretical movement centered around the journal Tel Quel. In his earlier works, such as Writing Degree Zero (tr. 1953) and Mythologies (1957, tr. 1972), he argued that literature, like all forms of communication, is essentially a system of signs. As such, he argued that it encodes various ideologies or "myths," to be decoded in terms of its own organizing principles or internal structures. He was strongly influenced by the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, and his ideas, as expressed in works such as S/Z (1970, tr. 1974) and Empire of Signs (1970, tr. 1982), became more eclectic. Barthes has had an enormous influence on American literary theory.

Bibliography

See studies by J. Culler (1983), P. Lombardo (1989), and M. B. Wiseman (1989).

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Barthes, Roland (Gérard)

(born Nov. 12, 1915, Cherbourg, France—died March 25, 1980, Paris) French social and literary critic. His early books examined the arbitrariness of the constructs of language and applied similar analyses to popular-culture phenomena. He analyzed mass culture in Mythologies (1957). On Racine (1963) set off a literary furor, pitting him against more traditional French literary scholars. His later contributions to semiotics included the even more radical S/Z (1970); The Empire of Signs (1970), his study of Japan; and other significant works that brought his theories wide (if belated) attention in the 1970s and helped establish structuralism as one of the leading intellectual movements of the 20th century. In 1976 he became the first person to hold the chair of literary semiology at the Collège de France.