Roland Barthes 1915 – 1980

Roland Barthes was a French literary theorist, semiotician, and essayist. His Mythologies submitted the codes of everyday French life to a structural reading, while Elements of Semiology and S/Z developed and then contested the structuralist project. His essay The Death of the Author redirected critical attention from biographical intention to the play of language in the text, and his late autobiographical writing, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes and A Lover's Discourse, dissolved the genres of theory and life-writing. He died after being struck by a laundry van in Paris.

Roland Barthes was born in 1915 in Cherbourg; his father, a naval officer, was killed in action during the First World War. Raised by his mother in Bayonne and Paris, he studied classics and grammar at the Sorbonne but had his academic career repeatedly interrupted by tuberculosis, which kept him in sanatoria for much of the 1940s. He spent years teaching French abroad, in Bucharest and Alexandria, before joining the CNRS and then the Ecole pratique des hautes etudes in Paris.

His major works trace an arc from existentialist Marxism to structuralism and beyond. Writing Degree Zero (1953) and Mythologies (1957) dissect the ideologies of bourgeois culture; S/Z (1970) and The Fashion System (1967) develop a structural semiotics; The Pleasure of the Text (1973), Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975), A Lover's Discourse (1977), and Camera Lucida (1980) move toward a more personal, fragmentary, and elegiac mode. He was elected to the College de France in 1976.

Barthes gave currency to ideas — the death of the author, the writerly text, the punctum, the connotative codes of culture — that became foundational for literary theory, cultural studies, and visual studies. He was struck by a laundry van in the rue des Ecoles in February 1980 and died of his injuries a month later, shortly after the death of his mother to whose memory Camera Lucida was dedicated.