Roland Barthes (1915 - 1980) was a French literary critic, literary critic, social theorist and semiotician. Barthes's works are among the most central in both the structuralist and post-structuralist currents in semiotics. He was an overt homosexual, and some describe him as one of the fathers of queer theory. In addition, the autobiographical and aesthetic quality of Barthes's writings transforms many of them from theoretical studies to real literature.
In his 1967 article "The Death of the Author" Barthes argued strongly against the centrality of the author's character in the study of literature. Michel Foucault 's article , What is an Author? Responded to Barthes' article in an analysis of the author's social and literary functions.
Barthes's book, S/Z , is often referred to as the masterpiece of structuralist literary criticism. In this book, Barthes analyzes Balzac's "Sarrasine" story, examines sentence after sentence, and associates each word and sentence with different "codes" and different stages of meaning in the story. However, there are those who argue that already in this book Barthes is in fact making a parody of structuralist research, and to the point of ridiculing the research methods of this current.
Barthes's cultural critique, published in "Mythologies", among others , contains some of the founding texts of the stream of cultural studies . In these studies he applied techniques of social and literary critique of mass culture . "Mythologies" is a collection of short and clever analyzes of cultural objects, from zoos to museums and fashion (a topic that Barthes described in detail later in his article The Fashion System ). The second part of Mythologies is the theortical Myth Today.
Some of Barthes's later works are more personal, though they are still critical works. The most famous of these works is his book Roland Barthes (often also called "Barthes on Barthes"), a theoretical autobiography , arranged in alphabetical order rather than chronologically. His latest book, Camera Lucida, is a personal memoir, memoirs about his mother and him, and research on photography .
In 1975 , Barthes was accepted to the prestigious Collège de France, with the help of Michel Foucault, who supported him despite the strained relationship between the two thinkers. He held the chair of semiology from 1980-1977. On February 26, 1980, Barthes was hit by a truck on the Rue de l'Ecole in Paris , following a gala dinner attended by François Mitterrand . He died of his wounds about a month later, on March 26, 1980.
