Roland Barthes

12 Key excerpts on "Roland Barthes"

• 

  eBook - PDF

  Critical Theory for Library and Information Science

  Exploring the Social from Across the Disciplines

  • Gloria J. Leckie, Lisa M. Given, John E. Buschman, Gloria J. Leckie, Lisa M. Given, John E. Buschman(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Libraries Unlimited

    (Publisher)

  He gained his reputation as a literary critic, a cultural philosopher and, not the least, a semiolo- gist. BarthesÊ ideas were set forth in a series of essays originally published in Albert CamusÊ journal, Combat, and compiled in the volume Le degré zéro de lÊécriture (Bar- thes 1953). These texts established Barthes as a prominent critic of French Modernist literature. In the early 1950s Roland BarthesÊ writings also came in contact with semiology. This very quickly engaged him in a rethinking of the notion of signs with profound asso- ciations of a Marxist critique of the mythe petite-bourgeoise (Barthes 1957a). Moreover, 16 CRITICAL THEORY FOR LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SCIENCE Barthes had an impact on the development of semiology as a research field as he ex- panded on the work of Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure, one of the founding fathers of modern semiology, focused on theoretical relationships between signs in a closed system, more or less ignoring the role played by the interpreter. Barthes, however, in- tegrated and elaborated on this idea; his expanded notion of signs included analyses of (for example) theatre, fashion, popular culture, tourism, images, and social conventions as semiotic systems. He embraced a theoretical approach to semiology as well as a cul- tural criticism in which meaning production, the signification, was central. In the following sections, it is primarily as a semiologist that the influence of Ro- land Barthes is discussed. It is a semiology that in different, partly overlapping phases touched upon and had an impact on existentialist, Marxist, and phenomenological, as well as structuralist and (later) poststructuralist thinking. My brief departure is to pay attention to BarthesÊ most important contribution to current semiology. Next, I map out phases in his writings, in particular facilitated by his own taxonomy from Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (Barthes 1975).

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Modern Criticism and Theory

  A Reader

  • Nigel Wood, David Lodge(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  17 Roland Barthes

  DOI: 10.4324/9781315835488-17

  Introductory note

  Roland Barthes (1915–80) was the most brilliant and influential of the generation of literary critics who came to prominence in France in the 1960s. After a slow start to his academic career (due mainly to illness), Barthes became a teacher at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, and at the time of his death was Professor of Literary Semiology (a title of his own choice) at the prestigious Collège de France. His first book, Writing Degree Zero (1953; English translation 1972) was a polemical essay on the history of French literary style, in which the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre is perceptible. Mythologies (1957; translated 1973), perhaps Barthes’ most accessible work, wittily analysed various manifestations of popular and high culture at the expense of bourgeois ‘common sense’. A controversy with a traditionalist Sorbonne professor, Raymond Picard, in the mid-1960s, made Barthes famous, or notorious, as the leading iconoclast of ‘la nouvelle critique’. This movement, a rather loose alliance of critics opposed to traditional academic criticism and literary history, drew some of its inspiration from the experiments of the nouveau roman (see Alain Robbe-Grillet, ‘A Future for the Novel’, section 3 4 in 20th Century Literary Criticism), and in the late 60s and early 70s was associated with radical left-wing politics (especially in the journal Tel Quel – see Introductory note on Julia Kristeva, below p. 348); but methodologically it depended heavily on structuralist semiotics in the tradition of Saussure and Jakobson.

  Barthes himself produced an austere treatise on The Elements of Semiology in 1964 (translated 1967) and an influential essay entitled ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative’ in 1966 (included in Image-Music-Text

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Profiles in Contemporary Social Theory

  • Anthony Elliott, Bryan S Turner, Anthony Elliott, Bryan S Turner(Authors)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  14 Roland Barthes CHRIS ROJEK BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS AND THEORETICAL CONTEXT R oland Barthes (1915±80) was the most celebrated post-structuralist stylist of his generation. It was a status he attained only after a lengthy association with structuralism. For a dec-ade and a half, Barthes was pivotal in the project of trying to situate literary and cul-tural criticism upon a quasi-scienti®c foot-ing. In works like Writing Degree Zero (1965), Mythologies (1957), Elements of Semiology (1965) and The Fashion System (1967) he laid out the formal principles of semiology, the science of signs. Semiology was, perhaps, the high-water mark of structuralist rhetoric. It was an approach which promised nothing less than the demysti®cation of culture and communi-cation. It was a noble but, with hindsight, giddy, turn in the history of ideas. From the ®rst, Barthes was wary of the possibility of being con®ned by the project of academic system-building. Indeed, throughout his life he was more attracted to the practice of writing and teaching, than academic life per se . As he observed on several occasions, his academic career was, in fact, somewhat unusual. To begin with, his ®rst publications appeared as monthly newspaper columns in Lettres Nouvelles , rather than through the con-ventional medium of academic journals and conference proceedings. These brief essays were on subjects that scarcely ®gured in the academic core curriculum of the day: washing powder ads, wrestling, striptease, the Tour de France, the Abbe  Pierre, Poujade, the face of Greta Garbo, Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront , the Dominici affair (an unsolved murder in rural France), and the evangelist Billy Graham. Eventually, they formed the basis for his in¯uential book Mythologies (1957). Barthes added a longer theoretical essay, `Myth Today,' to the volume, partly to `academize' a publication which might otherwise have seemed an amorphous concoction.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Semiotic Principles & Human Communication

  • Christina Schoushkoff(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Society Publishing

    (Publisher)

  Roland Barthes CHAPTER 23 I have saved the best part for the last chapter. Namely, practical analyses we will engage in according to Roland Barthes semiotic theory. A little bit about Barthes and why did I choose him for my analyses. Roland Barthes, in full Roland Gérard Barthes, (born November 12, 1915, Cherbourg, France—died March 25, 1980, Paris), French essayist and social and literary critic whose writings on semiotics, the formal study of symbols and signs pioneered by Ferdinand de Saussure, helped establish structuralism and the New Criticism as leading intellectual movements. Barthes studied at the University of Paris, where he took a degree in classical letters in 1939 and in grammar and philology in 1943. After working (1952–59) at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, he was appointed to the École Pratique des Hautes Études. In 1976 he became the first person to hold the chair of the literary semiology at the Collège de France. Semiotic Principles & Human Communication 270 His first book, Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (1953; Writing Degree Zero), was a literary manifesto that examined the arbitrariness of the constructs of language. In subsequent books—including Mythologies (1957), Essais critiques (1964; Critical Essays), and La Tour Eiffel (1964; The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies)—he applied the same critical apparatus to the “mythologies” (i.e., the hidden assumptions) behind popular cultural phenomena from advertising and fashion to the Eiffel Tower and wrestling. His Sur Racine (1963; On Racine) set off a literary furor in France, pitting Barthes against traditional academics who thought this “new criticism,” which viewed texts as a system of signs, was desecrating the classics. Even more radical was S/Z (1970), a line-by-line semiological analysis of a short story by Honoré de Balzac in which Barthes stressed the active role of the reader in constructing a narrative based on “cues” in the text.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Radical Indecision

  Barthes, Blanchot, Derrida, and the Future of Criticism

  • Leslie Hill(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • University of Notre Dame Press

    (Publisher)

  Roland Barthes, Leçon 1 Few critics displayed with the economy or intensity of Roland Barthes the contradictions and impasses, revisions and hesitations, shifts and detours that mark the history of literary theory and criticism during the second half of the twentieth century. From the early 1950s till his 71 72 Radical Indecision untimely death in 1980, Barthes came to embody, one after the other, sometimes even simultaneously, a multiplicity of divergent and seem-ingly irreconcilable approaches to texts, literary and non-literary alike, ranging from a phenomenologically or existentially inspired themati-cism to a proto-Marxian, at times explicitly Marxist commitment to ideological demystification, a protracted engagement with the concepts and methodology of Saussurean linguistics, an eclectic dalliance with sociology, anthropology, and psychoanalysis, the affirmation of textual plurality as a criterion of value, a rehabilitation of textual pleasure as an object of inquiry—all of which coexisted throughout with a deep-seated suspicion of ideological and other stereotypes, a restless distrust of po-litical, interpretative, metalinguistic, even theoretical authority, a will-ingness at timely as well as untimely moments to defend the literary and artistic avant-garde, outweighed only by an equally uncompromis-ing devotion to a favoured body of both established and neglected clas-sics, and an acute sensitivity to textual forms in general, whose bound-aries Barthes in his own writing was constantly exploring, deploying a mobile repertoire of styles and idioms that went from polemical inter-vention to theoretical excursus, from critical diagnosis to expressions of appreciation, from aphoristic fragment to oblique autobiographical exposure.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Pillars in the History of Biblical Interpretation, Volume 3

  Further Essays on Prevailing Methods

  • Stanley E. Porter, Zachary K. Dawson, Stanley E. Porter, Zachary K. Dawson(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Pickwick Publications

    (Publisher)

  50

  Roland Barthes

  Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, and the Pleasure of the Writing Subject

  David J. Fuller

  Introduction

  R oland Barthes’s vast array of literary and cultural criticism offers contemporary exegetes a tempting buffet of postures and critical lenses. His sprawling corpus and challenging terminology render him difficult to categorize within the conventional schema used for the development of critical idioms.1948 It is the intention of this chapter to provide an introduction to Barthes’s life and thought for practitioners of biblical studies. Accordingly, it will begin with a survey of Barthes’s historical and intellectual context. Next, it will proceed to an exposition of the methodologies and underlying worldviews he subscribed to over time. Finally, it will cover an example of Barthes’s own interpretation of the Bible (specifically, Acts 10 –11 ), with an eye to comparing his procedures and conclusions to those of more conventional scholarship, as well as discerning the possible shortcomings or insights his work may continue to generate.

  Barthes: His Life and Intellectual Context Biographical Outline

  Roland Barthes’s family history contains a diverse array of characters and events, reminiscent of the structural tropes in literature and theatre that he would later famously dissect. His maternal grandfather was a notable explorer of West Africa who later held public office in France as the director of African Affairs, while his paternal grandfather worked as an inspector for a railway company.1949 Roland’s father, Louis Barthes (born in 1883 ), met his mother, Henriette Binger (born in 1 893 ), in 1913 when Louis was working on a steamship that Henriette took on a trip to Canada. They were quickly married even though Henriette’s family came from a much wealthier background and protested the match.1950 Roland was born on November 12 , 1915 in Cherbourg.1951 Just one month shy of Roland’s first birthday, his father was killed in a naval battle.1952 His early childhood was marked by time spent with exclusively female parental figures as well as poverty, but was not without exposure to music and culture.1953 In 1924 his mother moved to Paris, where he attended the Lycée Montaigne, and in 1930 he began studying at Lycée Louis-le-Grand,1954 where he distinguished himself as an outstanding student.1955 His hopes of going to university at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure were shattered in 1 934 due to his tuberculosis,1956 and as a result he was forced to spend time in the mountains of the Pyrenees for healing, where for approximately a year he read literature, played the piano, and decidedly rejected Christianity due to the influence of Nietzsche.1957 Barthes then studied classics at the Sorbonne for the next four years.1958

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  The Poverty of Structuralism

  Literature and Structuralist Theory

  • Leonard Jackson(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (Barthes 1975 p. 195). I reproduce this below.

   

  Intertext	Genre	Works
  (Gide)	(desire to write)
  Sartre Marx Brecht	social mythology	Writing Degree Zero Writings on theatre Mythologies
  Saussure	semiology	Elements of Semiology Système de la Mode
  Soilers, Kristeva Derrida, Lacan	textuality	S/Z Sade, Fourier, Loyola L’Empire des Signes
  (Nietzsche)	morality	The Pleasure of the Text Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes

  As will be seen, we can divide Barthes’ work into four major phases. The first phase is the pre-structuralist one – that of Writing Degree Zero (1953); of the earlier essays in Critical Essays (1964), including four good essays on Brecht and three on Robbe-Grillet; and of Mythologies (1957). (I won’t here discuss the books Michelet or On Racine .)

  This phase could perhaps be called ‘Roland Barthes in the Age of Sartre’; there were other influences upon him, like Brecht and Robbe-Grillet; but there was no other overshadow. Barthes was born in 1915; he was ten years younger than Sartre, and like him a leftist literary intellectual, slightly hostile to the French academic system and vocally hostile to the bourgeoisie. Sartre, however, was something more than this. He was the acknowledged leader of the dominant philosophical school in Paris: existentialism. Barthes, in the early 1950s, had nothing like that behind him; only a set of unsystematic insights into the artificiality of bourgeois culture; and otherwise, only the generalized non-party Marxism and unorthodox psychoanalysis readily available in Paris. There was, therefore, no chance of the unreconstructed Barthes replacing Sartre as the arbiter of French intellectual fashion. Not till the 1960s was Sartre toppled from his throne; and it took the whole structuralist junta to do this: Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Barthes, Althusser, Foucault and Derrida, misrecognized as a government in the realm of the imaginary.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Structuralism and the Biblical Text

  • David C. Greenwood(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  3 The Methodology of Roland Barthes While deriving much of its content from linguistics, Barthes' methodology developed along quite different lines from that of Lévi-Strauss. His particular form of narrative analysis emerged at the juncture of linguistics, Freudian psychoanalysis, belletristic criticism, and the Marxist understanding of literature as having a predominantly social purpose. His early works, such as Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology, were formulated in opposition to existentialism, with its emphasis upon subjective individuality, and its indifference towards the role of language in structuring subjectivity. While synchronic in character, his method-ology incorporated diachronic elements which are excluded from strictly synchronic literary analyses. There is thus not the sharp antithesis between history and structure in his theory that one finds in the work of Lévi-Strauss and subsequently of A.J. Greimas. I shall refer to Barthes consistently as a structuralist, even though he abandoned structuralism towards the end of his life. In S/Z he maintained that, despite his earlier enthusiasm for structuralism, he had realized the uselessness of attempting to develop a satis-factory structuralist methodology for the study of literature. He acknowledged the impossibility of establishing a universal network of relations characteristic of narratives, and finally concluded that the primary role of literature is iconoclastic in relation to the power of language. In this discussion I shall not deal with Barthes' post-structuralist thinking. As a structuralist, Barthes did not engage in extensive compara-tive analysis to develop a single structural narrative model. Instead, he probed intensively into the individual text to demonstrate the unique way in which each narrative discloses its meaning through the use of overlapping codes.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  The Future of Theory

  • Jean-Michel Rabaté(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  3 Theory, Science, Technology When Barthes was promoting his hard version of structuralism, dis-seminating views he would soon repudiate, an endeavor for which he was taken to task by Paul de Man as we have seen in the Baltimore debate, he presented literary history as scholarship domi-nated by concepts that tended to allegorize periods and trends. For instance, the modern period, ushered in by Flaubert and Mallarmé, would mark the end of a “classical” writing loaded with all the sins of bourgeois possessiveness, dull common sense, and a naive belief in language’s transparency; after this “revolution,” literature would turn into a problematic of language and begin its endless revolu-tion in the name of writing. We have seen how the “writing degree zero” exemplified by Camus or the practitioners of the nouveau roman would lead to pure literature, or Blanchot’s ideal of the “neuter,” a neutral or blank voice deprived of all traditional markers heralding literary style. Thus literature would be set free as sheer literarity, discharged from usual communicative functions and embarking on the exploration of particular uses of language. Barthes was nevertheless aware of the dangerously mythical position he was made to occupy, as he tried to argue in reply to de Man. If every-thing that he produces as a critic merely perpetuated a mythology of literary language which took writing as the main signifier of lit-erary myth, 1 could the science of structural linguistics that had so far helped Lévi-Strauss structure his analysis of myth and society

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Approaches to Poetics

  • (Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Columbia University Press

    (Publisher)

  Sign, Sense, and Barthes 4 7 shock: Barthes proposes to us not works but texts, that is, tis-sues of signs derived from codes, chains of signifiers and signi-fieds having no limits or centers that merge, in fact, into a sin-gle Text held together (at least in its essential tendency) by a dreamlike logic of the intemporal, the reversible, the inter-changeable. (3) If, again, we find ourselves conceiving of the reader-critic as a kind of consumer of literature, first passive and then reactive, either moving toward a judgment of what the author has offered or joining him in his way of seeing him-self and the world, we are brought up short by Barthes's asser-tions: for him the reader has an extraordinarily active role to play; he is a producer, not a consumer, of meanings; he is, himself, a system of meanings and codes; by microanalysis he discovers structures and watches them move into and out of his field of view; and most important of all, he writes as well as reads, trying always to tie his mode of discourse into the cir-cuits resonating in the original text. (4) If, finally, we adopt— on the example of some ancient and neo-classical critics— the thesis that literary works have as their aim or effect some kind of instructing, moving, and pleasing (taken together or in some combination and preferably redefined so as to save our vocabulary from too-close association with that of oratory), we collide once again with the position of Barthes: having pul-verized the work as such, he makes of it the means whereby we may enter a process of using and transforming signs; we shall no doubt be instructed, moved, and pleased in the pecu-liar way that semiology makes possible; but we must realize, by a Copernican leap, that we are not the center of this activ-ity; we do not constitute it—we are born into it; we do not 4 8 HUGH M. DAVIDSON select it—it selects us; and so the effect of the text is finally to draw us into the infinitely permutative play of subjectless language.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Doing Cultural Theory

  • David Walton(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  The questioning of this disinterested view promised by so-called objective science has become very important to what have become poststructuralist approaches. In fact, Barthes stated that he did not agree with the belief that there is the objectivity of the scientist, on the one hand, and the limited subjectivity of the writer, on the other. He lived the contradiction of the two (11), able, in the same book, to write in terms of ‘objective analysis’ and admit that ‘form is always there to outdistance the meaning’ (122). This introduces an element of, to use something of a clichéd term, ‘slippage’ into what may have seemed an effort to fix meaning through semiological analysis. It is this consciousness of having to live with theoretical contradictions that could be said to characterize the deconstructive thinking of Jacques Derrida and poststructuralist thinking in general. Readers as writers, the death of the author and ‘authoricide’ Barthes’ essay entitled ‘The Death of the Author’ is also very useful in terms of introducing themes which echo motifs found in deconstructive thinking. This is because of what the essay has to tell us about the relations between authors, interpretation and the (de)stabilization of meanings. In this essay Barthes makes the point that the figure of the author is a modern phenomenon arising from around the time of the Middle Ages, insofar as in pre-modern societies (what he calls ‘ethnographic societies’) stories were recounted by mediators. Barthes stresses that in the Middle Ages emphasis was placed more on the skill of the narrator rather than on the ‘author’ as ‘genius’

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Barthes/Burgin

  • Ryan Bishop, Sunil Manghani(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • EUP

    (Publisher)

  These might not seem natural bedfellows. Two very different mediums. In your case the works are resolutely artworks, involving painstaking 3D modelling and lots of attention to detail. While Barthes’ works on paper are more akin to automatic writing; mere exercises in mark-making. Crucially, Barthes is not an artist, and would never have suggested as much. If we think of artists such as Cy Twombly (whom Barthes admired), Mark Tobey and Simon Hanteï, there are resonances – each (at different points in their careers) work around the boundary of writing and drawing. Yet there is a very different sense of scale, composition and material process that quickly marks them out as practitioners. By contrast, Barthes hovers about the boundary between writing and drawing, but only as a dalliance, as an escape from the fact that he is a writer (underneath the reproduction of one of his drawings in Roland Barthes, for example, he captions it simply ‘Squandering’ (Barthes 1977a: 113)). His motor-reflex is to scribble not mark. Nonetheless, there is a latent artist in Barthes (in his book, Roland Barthes: The Professor of Desire, Stephen Ungar has suggested a repressed artist, though I’d disagree). This becomes apparent in his late career, and is captured explicitly in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, in which he claims the semiologist needs to be an artist playing with signs ‘as with a conscious decoy, whose fascination he savours and wants to make others savour and understand’. The sign for this artist ‘is always immediate, subject to the kind of evidence that leaps to the eyes, like a trigger of the imagination’, which is why semiology in this case ‘is not a hermeneutics: it paints more than it digs’ (Barthes 2000: 475). I have always liked this line. A book such as Empire of Signs is a good example of what it might look like for the semiologist to paint rather than dig.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book