Thinker · TH-0362
Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes was a French literary theorist, critic and semiotician who taught at the École pratique des hautes études and from 1977 at the…
1915 – 1980 · Cherbourg; Bayonne; Paris
Traditions: Continental
Schools: Structuralism & post-structuralism
Roland Barthes was a French literary theorist, critic and semiotician who taught at the École pratique des hautes études and from 1977 at the Collège de France. He moved from structuralist analysis of cultural signs, as in Mythologies, towards post-structuralism. His essay "The Death of the Author" argued that a text's meaning is not fixed by its author's intention but produced in reading, so that the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.
Key ideas
- Myth turns historical, cultural meanings into what looks like nature.
- A text is a fabric of quotations, and its unity lies in its destination, the reader, not its origin.
- Authorial intention neither fixes nor limits a text's meaning.
- A photograph can hold a punctum, a detail that pierces the viewer beyond its studied meaning.
Major works
- Writing Degree Zero (Le Degré zéro de l'écriture, 1953)
- Mythologies (1957)
- "The Death of the Author" (1967)
- Camera Lucida (La Chambre claire, 1980)
In the conversation
- Discussion “That’s not what I meant”: a comic on jokes, apologies and who owns the meaning
- Reading group Reading group: Wimsatt and Beardsley, then Barthes, then Hirsch on who owns a text’s meaning
- Debate A translator cannot afford to be an anti-intentionalist
- Question My lecturer says the poet’s own explanation doesn’t count. Where does that idea come from?
In the Coordinates
The questions of philosophy where Roland Barthes takes a place, from The Coordinates of Thought.
- 5.2.2 Artistic Intention Does the artist get to say what the work means?