Roland Barthes (1915-1980)

French social and literary critic, whose writings on semiotics made structuralism one of the leading intellectual movements of the 20th century. In his lifetime Barthes published seventeen books and numerous articles, many of which were gathered to form collections. His ideas have offered alternatives to the methods of traditional literary scholarship. Barthes' writings have had a considerable following among students and teachers both in and outside France.

The writer's language is not expected to represent reality, but to signify it. This should impose on critics the duty of using two rigorously distinct methods: one must deal with the writer's realism either as an ideological substance (Marxist themes in Brecht's work, for instance) or as a semiological value (the props, the actors, the music, the colours in Brechtian dramaturgy). The ideal of-course would be to combine these two types of criticism; the mistake which is constantly made is to confuse them: ideology has its methods, and so has semiology. (from Mythologies, 1957)

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In ELÉMENTS DE SÉMIOLOGIE (1964) Barthes systematized his views on the "science of signs", based on Ferdinand de Saussure's (1857-1913) concept of language and analysis of myth and ritual. Barthes made his most intensive application of structural linguistics in S/Z (1970). By analyzing phase-by-phase Balzac's short story 'Sarrasine', he dealt with the experience of reading, the relations of the reader as subject to the movement of language in texts. According to Barthes, classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader. But the reader is the space, in which all the multiple aspects of the text meet. A text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. "... the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author." The study has become the focal point and model for multilevel – nearly playful – literary criticism because of its analytical concentration on the structural elements that constitute the literary whole.

One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograph of Napoleon's youngest brother, Jerome, taken in 1852. And I realized then, with an amazement I have not been able to lessen since: "I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor."(from Camera Lucinda, 1980)