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.
Key facts
- Nationality
- French
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Post-Structuralism, Continental
Selected quotes
-
Attributed to Roland Barthes:
“The death of the author is the birth of the reader.”
-
Attributed to Roland Barthes:
“Literature is the question minus the answer.”
-
Attributed to Roland Barthes:
“The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture.”
-
Attributed to Roland Barthes:
“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other.”
-
Attributed to Roland Barthes:
“What love lays bare in me is energy.”