Roland Barthes Overview

Roland Barthes gleefully eluded any attempt to reduce or classify his thought. He was instrumental in spreading word of Structuralism and Semiotics both within and beyond the academy. His "Mythologies" -- a series of pithy readings covering everything from wrestling to... [more]

Roland Barthes gleefully eluded any attempt to reduce or classify his thought. He was instrumental in spreading word of Structuralism and Semiotics both within and beyond the academy. His "Mythologies" -- a series of pithy readings covering everything from wrestling to soap ads -- remains a canonical text in classrooms where the art and science of interpreting signs are taught. These brief essays had their origins, however, as columns for newspapers like "Le Monde," where Barthes punctured the barrier that had separated "high" and "low" culture. To define Barthes narrowly as a Structuralist or semiotician would be misleading. He was a rhetor, trained in classical letters and philology; a creative writer, revealing the intimacies of love; a psychoanalyst diagnosing culture; an art critic revealing the machinations of the photograph. He was a man of letters, in the best possible sense of the word: he lived, breathed, and fed on language. Language was his environs, his plaything, his nourishment -- and he moved through it with a rare grace. He wrote 17 books and endless streams of articles, yet he never completed his doctorate; the tuberculosis he contracted in 1934 continued to plague him through his life (although he didn't die until 1981). But in all his prose, one never detects the ache of illness. On the contrary, a great health pervades Barthes' works, a joy in thought and words. Like Nietzsche, Barthes never reduced the texts he read: he allowed them their play, followed them -- and they in turn followed him. [show less]