Barthes, Roland

« Barthes, Roland In the field of contemporary literary studies, the French essayist and cultural critic Roland Barthes cannot be easily classified.

His early work on language and culture was strongly influenced by the intellectual currents of existentialism and Marxism that were dominant in French intellectual life in the mid-twentieth century.

Gradually his work turned more to semiology (a general theory of signs), which had a close association with the structuralist tradition in literary criticism.

In his later work, Barthes wrote more as a post-structuralist than as a structuralist in an attempt to define the nature and authority of a text.

Throughout his writings Barthes rejected the ‘naturalist' view of language, which takes the sign as a representation of reality.

He maintained that language is a dynamic activity that dramatically affects literary and cultural practices. 1 Early writings Roland Barthes was born in Cherbourg, France and studied French literature and Classics at the University of Paris.

After a long illness that caused him to spend time in sanatoria during the war years, he taught French at the Universities of Bucharest and Alexandria, and began further studies in sociology.

In 1947 he published a number of articles in Combat on literary criticism that formed the basis of his first book, Le Degré zéro de l'écriture (1953) (Writing Degree Zero , 1968).

In 1960 he began teaching at the École Pratique des Hautes Études , and in 1976 he became Professor of Literary Semiology at the Collège de France.

Barthes died after being struck by a van outside the Collège de France. In Writing Degree Zero Barthes formulated a theory of writing on the basis of an account of language as a ‘social object' and a ‘field of action' in which the writer communicates.

This account has much in common with the existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre , who, like Barthes, sought to break free of the orthodox view of literature as a-historical and considered it ideological in its unquestioned acceptance of the bourgeois universe.

Against this view the writer is to be a liberator.

Unlike Sartre, however, Barthes came to the conclusion that the writer can do little directly to effect social change and that the writer does not write exclusively for the sake of society.

The writer also writes for the sake of writing.

Barthes uses the special term ‘writing' (écriture ) to capture this double aspect of the writer.

Writing is the middle ground between language, as that which resides in history (the material of writing), and style, as that which is indifferent to history and society (personal contribution to writing). Accordingly, writing is neither strictly historical nor strictly personal; it is an ambiguous reality arising as a confrontation of the writer with society and at the same time referring the writer back to the instruments of creation. Increasingly Barthes came to adopt a more complex view of language, which enabled him further to develop his critique of the status quo.

In general this view followed the linguistic structuralism of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure , for whom language as a whole was composed of langue , the system of signs that allows for the. »