Roland
Barthes
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 methods of traditional
literary scholarship. Barthes' writings have had a considerable following among
students and teachers both in and outside France.
Roland Barthes was born in Cherbough, Manche. After his
father's death in a naval battle in 1916, Barthes' mother Henriette
Binger Barthes moved to Bayonne, where Barthes spent his childhood. In 1924 she
moved with her son to Paris, where Barthes attended the Lycée
Montaigne (1924-30) and Lycée Louis-le-Grand
(1930-34). "Not an unhappy youth," Barthes later recalled,
"thanks to the affection which surrounded me, but an awkward one, because
of the solitude and material constraint." In 1927 Henriette
gave birth to an illegitimate child, Michel Salzado,
Barthes' half-brother. When Barthes' grandparents refused to give her financial
help, she supported her family as a bookbinder. At the Sorbonne Barthes studied
classical literature, Greek tragedy, grammar and philology, receiving degrees
in classical literature (1939) and grammar and philology (1943).
In 1934 Barthes contracted
tuberculosis and spent the years 1934-35 and 1942-46 in sanatoriums. During the
Occupation he was in a sanatorium in the Isère.
Numerous relapses with tuberculosis prevented him from carrying out his
doctoral research, but he read avidly, founded a theatrical troupe, and began
to write. Barthes was a teacher at lycées in Biarritz
(1939), Bayonne (1939-40), Paris (1942-46), at the French Institute in
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.
Barthes entered the French
intellectual scene in the 1950s. The work which brought him into modern
literature was Sartre's What
is Literature? (1947) LE DEGRÉ ZÉRO DE L'ÉCRITURE (1953, Writing Degree
Zero) was initially published as articles in Albert Camus' journal, Combat. It established Barthes as
one of leading critics of Modernist literature in France. It introduced the
concept of écriture ("scription")
as distinguished from style, language, and writing. 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. His
material was newspapers, films, shows and exhibitions, because of their
connection to ideological abuse. Barthes' starting point was not in the
traditional value judgements 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" An
advertising firm found Barthes' works so compelling that it persuaded him to
work briefly as a consultant for the auto manufacturer Renault.
Barthes' study SUR RACINE
(1963) caused some controversy because of its nonscholarly
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' essays. Barthes answered in CRITIQUE ET VÉRITÉ (1966), which
postulated a "science of criticism" to replace the "university
criticism" perpetuated by Picard and his colleagues. Barthes recommended
that criticism become a science and showed that critical terms and approaches
are connected to dominant class-ideology. The values of clarity, nobility, and
humanity, taken as a self-evident basis for a research, are a censoring force
on other kinds of approach.
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 relationship with the text. Barthes analyzed his desire to read along
with his likes, dislikes, and motivations associated with that activity.
L'EMPIRE DES SIGNES (1970) was written after Barthes's visit to Japan, and
dealt with the country's myths. In this great introduction to the art of
definitions, Japanese cooking was for him "the twilight of the raw",
a haiku a "vision without commentary", and sex "is everywhere,
except in sexuality."
In ELÉMENTS DE SÉMIOLOGIE
(1964) Barthes systematized his views on the "science of signs",
based on Ferdinand de Saussure's (1857-1913) concept of language and analysis
of myth and ritual. Barthes made his most intensive application of structural
linguistics in S/Z (1970). By analyzing 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 multilevel - nearly playful - literary criticism because of its
analytical concentration on the structural elements that constitute the
literary whole.
Barthes' last book was LA
CHAMBRE CLAIRE (1980, Camera Lucida), in which photography is discussed as a
communicating medium. It was written in the short space between his mother's
death and his own. The author himself confesses that he is too impatient to be
a photographer, but whenever he poses in front of the lens, his "body
never finds its zero degree, no one can give it to me (perhaps only my mother?
For it is not indifference which erases the weight of the image - the Photomat always turns you into a criminal type, wanted by
the police - but love, extreme love)." Photography, especially portraits,
was for him "a magic, not an art." Through his life Barthes lived
with or near his mother, who died in 1977. During her illness Barthes nursed
her, and later wrote in Camera Lucida, that "ultimately I
experienced her, strong as she had been, my inner law, as my feminine child...
Once she was dead I no longer had any reason to attune myself to the progress
of the superior Life Force (the race, the species)." Barthes died three
years later in Paris as the result of a street accident on March 23, 1980.
Posthumously published INCIDENTS (1987) revealed the author's homosexuality.
Some rights reserved Petri Liukkonen (author)
& Ari Pesonen. Kuusankosken
kaupunginkirjasto 2008
-
Return to Roland Barthes’ biographies.
-
Return to Roland Barthes’ pag.
Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Amelia Noguera Rubio
norua@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press