Roland Barthes

(Cherbourg, 1915 – Paris, 1980)

Literary critic, essayist, sociologist and philosopher, graduate in classical languages from the Sorbonne University. He was one of the main representatives of the new criticism or structuralist criticism. In 1946 he began to collaborate in Combat, a left-wing newspaper, founded the magazine Théâtre Populaire and directed the Practical School of Higher Studies. He worked as a researcher in lexicology and sociology at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris.
In 1962 he was appointed director of studies at the Practical School of Higher Studies, and was appointed professor of Literary Semiology at the Collège de France in 1976. In the early seventies he proposed, together with Julia Kristeva, Phillipe Sollers, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan, founded a new science, semiology, to study the nature, production and interpretation of social signs through the analysis of texts. He received the title of Chevalier des Palmes Académiques. In addition to literary criticism, he wrote about music, art, cinema and photography. In his first book, The Zero Degree of Writing (1953), he analyzed the historical condition of literary language and delimited the concepts of language, style and writing. In Michelet for himself (1954) he made a critical reconstruction of the figure of the historian Jules Michelet (1798-1874). A compilation of 53 articles initially published in the magazine Les Lettres Nouvelles, between 1954 and 1956, was later transformed into Mythologies (1957), one of his most famous books, in which he systematically considered, in block, "that kind of monster which is the petite bourgeoisie", to understand its ideological abuses. In 1964, the Critical Essays appeared, in which he took into consideration the salient points of the most vivid literary theme in France, fully facing, in a critical confrontation with structuralism, the problem of the meaning of the literary work. In 1977, Fragments of a Loving Discourse was published, an essay-novel in which, through fragments, allusions and quotes, Barthes reflects on the "extreme loneliness" of an impossible speech. His last works are The Camera Lucida (La chambre claire, 1980) and, published posthumously, The Obvious and the Obtuso (L'obvie et l'obtus, 1982).