Barthes, Roland (1915—80)
French literary and cultural critic and leading light of both the structuralism and post-structuralism movements. His career was slow-moving to begin with, but at his death he was one of the most influential intellectuals in the world. Born in Cherbourg, in north-west France, in lowly circumstances (his father was a naval officer and his mother a homemaker) Barthes grew up in Bayonne, near the Spanish border. His childhood was uneventful and he would later remember it as punctuated by prolonged and intense periods of boredom. In 1924 he moved to Paris, going to school at the Lycée Montaigne in the sixth arrondissement behind the Luxembourg Gardens until he was 14 and then the Lycée Louis-le-Grand near the Sorbonne. In 1934 Barthes contracted tuberculosis, which required his removal to a mountain sanatorium, severely interrupting his academic career for the next ten years. Exempted from military service because of his illness, he spent the Second World War---when not in a sanatorium---working as a secondary school teacher, first in Biarritz, then in Paris. After the war Maurice Nadeau invited Barthes to contribute to the cultural pages of the prestigious underground publication Combat, founded by the Resistance and edited by an illustrious team of authors that included Albert Camus and Sartre, Jean-Paul. The essays Barthes submitted, which dealt with the ethico-political responsibility of writers, would become his first book Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (1953), translated as Writing Degree Zero (1967). Although this book spoke in favour of a politically engaged form of writing of the kind Sartre advocated (littérature engagée or committed writing), Barthes rarely if ever involved himself directly in political struggles. Indeed, in 1960 he fell out with his friend Nadeau because he refused to put his name to the ‘Manifesto of the 121’ declaring the right of insubordination in response to the Algerian War. Again in May ’68, Barthes kept his distance from the events of the student protest. Similarly in 1971 he joined neither the *Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons (Group for Information on Prisons) nor the Front Homosexuel d’Action Révolutionnaire (Homosexual Revolutionary Action). Barthes career path was chequered to say the least. Before he took his first academic job in the sixth section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études in 1960 (at the advanced age of 45), he worked for a number of years in the French Foreign Office. His first posting was to the French Institute in Romania, where he gave lectures on popular culture, developing the style he would perfect with Mythologies (1957), translated as Mythologies (1972). When the Romanian authorities decided to expel the Institute in 1949, Barthes was reassigned to Alexandria in Egypt, where he spent a great deal of his free time with the semiotician Greimas, Algirdas Julien who introduced him to the work of Saussure, Ferdinand de. In 1950 he returned to Paris, still without an academic job. He soon quit his job at the Foreign Office, finding it unbearably tedious, choosing instead to make ends meet by combining a series of untenured research assistant posts with cultural journalism. In 1953, again at the invitation of Maurice Nadeau, Barthes started writing a monthly column for the newly-established cultural journal, Les Lettres nouvelles. These essays looked through a critical lens at the minutiae of everyday life in all its banality, covering everything from soap bubbles, to striptease and pasta advertisements. When these essays were collected and published in book form as Mythologies in 1957 they were an immediate sensation. In this period, Barthes also contributed reviews to Théâtre populaire. The work of Other’s Berliner Ensemble, which regularly brought its productions to Paris, made a particularly big impression on Barthes. According to Jameson, Fredric, Brecht’s influence can readily be seen in Mythologies, which in his view is a profound instance of the estrangement-effect at work. The concept of myth that emerged from this work had a significant effect on the development of Cultural Studies. In 1958, Barthes asked Lévi-Strauss, Claude to supervise a doctoral dissertation on fashion, but the latter turned him down, though not without offering the invaluable advice that he should read Vladimir Propp’s Morfoloógija skázki (1928), translated as Morphology of the Folktale (1958). He eventually found a supervisor in linguist André Martinet, but never got around to actually finishing his PhD. His proposed project on fashion was however completed and published as Système de la mode (1967), translated as The Fashion System (1985). In 1963 he met Sollers, Philippe, the flamboyant novelist and editor of the newly established journal Tel Quel, with which Barthes’ name would become inextricably linked in the early 1970s in spite of the overtly Maoist orientation it adopted. In 1976, at Foucault, Michel’s instigation, Barthes was elected to the chair of literary semiology at the illustrious Collège de France, an incredible achievement for someone with such an unorthodox academic pedigree. His final book, written as a work of mourning for his mother, who died in 1977, La Chambre claire (1980) translated as Camera Lucida (1982), was a meditation on photography, a subject that had interested him his entire life. Now at the peak of his fame, largely thanks to the bestseller status of his previous book, the charming semi-autobiographical Fragments d’un discourse amoureux (1977), translated as A Lover’s Discourse (1979), Barthes was even interviewed by Playboy. Then tragedy struck. On February 25, 1980, while crossing the road, Barthes was knocked down by a delivery van. (Laurent Binet has used Barthes’ death as the basis of a mystery novel entitled The 7th Function of Language.) He was taken to the Hôpital Pitié-Salpêtrière and although the doctors did not think he’d been seriously injured he never regained his health and died a few weeks later on March 26. See also readerly and writerly, work and text. Further Reading: R. Bensmaïa The Barthes Effect: The Essay as Reflective Text (1987). J. Calvet Roland Barthes: A Biography (1994). J. Culler Barthes (1983). F. Jameson Brecht and Method (1998). A. Lavers Roland Barthes: Structuralism and After (1982). M. Moriarty Roland Barthes (1991). A. Stafford Roland Barthes, Phenomenon and Myth: An Intellectual Biography (1998).