Life
Roland Barthes was born on
November 12, 1915 in the town of Cherbourg in Normandy. He was the son of naval officer Louis Barthes, who
was killed in a battle in the North Sea before he turned one. His mother, Henriette Barthes, and his aunt and grandmother raised him
in the French little village of Urt and the city of Bayonne. When Barthes was nine, his family moved to Paris and it was there that he would grow to manhood
(though his attachment to his provincial roots would remain strong throughout
his life).
Barthes showed great promise
as a student and spent the period from 1935 to 1939 at the Sorbonne, earning a licence in classical letters.
Unfortunately, he was also plagued by ill health throughout this period,
suffering from tuberculosis that often had to be treated
in the isolation of sanatoria. His repeated physical breakdowns
disrupted his academic career, affecting his studies and his ability to take
certain qualifying examinations. However, it also kept him out of military
service during World War II, and, while being kept out of
the major French universities meant he had to travel a great deal for teaching
positions, Barthes later professed an intentional avoidance of major
degree-awarding universities throughout his career.
His life from 1939 to 1948 was
largely spent obtaining a license in grammar and philology, publishing his first papers, taking part in a
medical study and continuing to struggle with his health. In 1948 he returned
to purely academic work, gaining numerous short-term positions at institutes in
France, Romania and Egypt. During this time he contributed to the leftist
Parisian paper Combat, out of which grew his first full length work Writing
Degree Zero (1953). In 1952 Barthes was able to settle at the Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique when he studied lexicology and sociology. During his seven-year period there he began writing
a popular series of bimonthly essays for the magazine Les Lettres Nouvelles, in which he
dismantled myths of popular culture (gathered in the Mythologies collection published in
1957).
Barthes spent the early 60s
exploring the fields of semiology and structuralism, chairing various faculty
positions around France, and continuing to produce more full-length studies.
Many of his works challenged traditional academic views of literary criticism
and of specific, renowned figures of literature. His unorthodox thinking led to
a conflict with another French thinker, Raymond Picard, who attacked the French New Criticism (a label with which he
inaccurately identified Barthes) for being obscure and disrespectful to the
culture’s literary roots. Barthes' rebuttal in Criticism and Truth
(1966) accused the old, bourgeois criticism of being
unconcerned with the finer points of language and capable of selective
ignorance towards challenging concepts of theories like Marxism.
By the late 1960s Barthes had
established a reputation. He traveled to America and Japan, delivering a presentation at Johns Hopkins University, and producing his best known work, the 1967 essay “The
Death of the Author”, which, in light of the growing influence of Jacques Derrida's deconstructionist theory, would prove to be a
transitional piece investigating the logical ends of structuralist thought. Barthes continued to
contribute with Philippe
Sollers to the avant-garde literary magazine Tel Quel, which was very much
concerned with the kinds of theory being developed in his work. In 1970 Barthes
produced what many consider to be his most prodigious work, the dense critical reading of Balzac’s Sarrasine entitled S/Z. Throughout the 70s Barthes continued to develop his
literary criticism, pursuing new ideals of textuality and novelistic neutrality
through his works.
In 1977 he was elected to the
chair of Sémiologie Littéraire
at the Collège de France. In the same year his mother, to whom he had been devoted, died. The loss
of the woman who had raised and cared for him was a serious blow. He had often
written about photography, but his last major work, Camera
Lucida, was partly an essay about the nature of photography and partly a
meditation on photographs of Henriette Barthes.
Although the book contains many reproductions of photographs, none of them are
of Barthes' mother.
On 25 February 1980, after leaving a lunch party held by François
Mitterrand, Barthes was struck by a laundry van while walking home through the
streets of Paris. He succumbed to his injuries a month later and died on 25 March.
· This page was last modified on 8 December
2008, at 22:05.
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Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Amelia Noguera Rubio
norua@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press