Roland Barthes was a French essayist and literary critic, born in Cherbourg in 1915. He studied at University of Paris and had a primarily academic career, becoming the first person to hold the chair of literary semiology at the Collège de France in 1976. Barthes died in Paris in 1980 after being hit by a laundry truck. Sometimes obscure, Barthes was imitated and parodied but was the leading French intellectual of the late 1970s and continues to be extremely influential. Other radical French thinkers such as Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida were inspired by and inspired him in return.
His work established structuralism and New Criticism as leading intellectual movements. Major critical writings include Writing Degree Zero (1953) – a literary manifesto on the arbitrary nature of language - Mythologies (1957), Critical Essays (1964), The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies (1964) and; On Racine (1963). These works were on semiotics, which is a formal study of symbols and signs within text and was originally pioneered by Ferdinand de Saussure. Barthes also wrote an “antiautobiography”; Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975) and an account of a painful love affair, A Lover's Discourse (1977) both of which were popular successes, though he never overtly acknowledged his homosexuality.
The central idea of his work was language and how the ‘sign' is a historical and cultural convention. The ideal sign announces its arbitrariness and artificiality rather than masquerading as natural – for example in naming his book S/Z. Critically deconstructing the “mythologies” or hidden assumptions and ideologies behind popular culture, he caused controversy amongst traditional academics who felt semiology was vandalism of the classics. For example in S/Z (1970) he made a line by line analysis of a short story by Honoré de Balzac and read the text as a system of signs which enabled the active reader to construct the narrative. Thus, the reader or critic produces the text by carving it up into a multiple of possible meanings. A work does not mean anything at all, it is not a stable structure and all literature is intertextual, that is referring to other works. Arguing that traditional critics' notions of humanity and the believe in self-evident ‘truths' was in fact a censoring force, Barthes' most famous essay was “The Death of the Author” (1968) in which he contended that any text is in effect a series of quotations and feigns a set of assumptions. The author is dead in the sense that he does not determine the meaning of the text. Only by suspending preconceived ideas about the character of the author and human psychology itself, can a truly effective, productive and engaged reading be made.