ROLAND BARTHES (1915-1980) PART SIX Camera Lucida (1980) When he wrote Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes had little time left to him. It is one of the ironies of his ironic life that his last book–an extended act of mourning–would be his last before his...
ROLAND BARTHES (1915-1980) PART FIVE The Pleasure of the Text (1973) In his 1997 history of Structuralism, History of Structuralism: Volume One: The Rising Sign, 1945-1966, François Dosse described Roland Barthes in a number of ways–“the Mother Figure of...
ROLAND BARTHES (1915-1980) PART FOUR “The Death of the Author” (1968) “The Death of the Author,” written in 1967 and published in 1968, is a stance against the enclosure of Structuralism and the authority of formalism. While the essay by Roland...
ROLAND BARTHES PART THREE Towards Structuralism The goal of all structuralist activity, whether reflexive or poetic, is to reconstruct an object so as to manifest the rules of its functioning. In 1980, Edith Kurzweil published a still-indespensible book, The Age of...
ROLAND BARTHES (1915-1980) PART TWO Mythologies (1957) In the fifties, Roland Barthes was a semiologist, following Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) and Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009), in using the sign, the signifier and the signified to study the social condition....
