Roland Barthes (1915 – 1980)

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.

Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Paula Osoro Quiles
pauoqui@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press

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