Roland Barthes (1915 - 1980)

Introduction

Roland Barthes is regarded as one of the most prominent 20th century theorists in cultural and literary studies. As a Marxist literary critic, a semiologist, a structuralist and a poststructuralist, his contribution has had a significant influence on the Postmodern discourse. Barthes is most renowned for his work on semiotics - the concept that anything and everything in our culture today can be decoded. Barthes has been influenced by several modes of philosophical thought, including Marxism and existentialism in the 1940s, structuralism in the 1950s, semiology in the 1960s and poststructuralism in the 1970s.

Contribution

Structuralism

Barthes is best known for his work on structuralism and poststructuralism. According to Barthes, the goal of structuralism is to reconstitute literary work in order to reveal its rules of functioning that make meaning possible. This is similar to Derrida's deconstruction concept - both critics depart from traditional criticism that took for granted the fullness of literary work and opened to interpretations.

Jouissance

In 1970, Barthes published S/Z, a critical analysis of a short story by Honoré de Balzac. He states that, as a reader, there are two sensations experienced, plaisir or jouissance (both meaning 'pleasure'). While the traditional novel offers elements of plaisir such as intelligence, euphoria and security, a novel that displayed jouissance gave the reader a shock of something unexpected. Barthes explored the idea of having a text that displayed both plaisir and jouissance - the possibility of having a text made readable as well as shocking.

Writing Degree Zero

In 1953, Barthes published Writing Degree Zero - an exploration into linguistic and stylistic experimentation. It was written in response to Jean-Paul Sartre's Qu'est-ce que la littérature? (1947; ‘What is Literature?’, 1949). Sartre, a French existentialist philosopher, believed that literature, in order to engage with society, should be transparent, unambiguous and written in plain style and language. Sartre believed that words should be used to reveal the world and not to call attention to themselves. Barthes, however, in Writing Degree Zero, denied the possibility of a transparent prose.

Death of the Author

“Reading was no longer to be considered a passive process, but instead an active one in which the reader was fully engaged in the production of textual meaning. The birth of the reader, as Barthes put it, was to be achieved at the expense of the author.”
The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism (Taylor, 2001)

In 1968, Barthes proclaimed the ‘death of the author’ and advocated an ‘emptiness of language’. In this essay, he stated that the reader always created their own meaning, regardless of an author's original intention. The concept of an author as someone who had privileged access (authority) to and control of the core meaning of a text was no longer accepted by Barthes. His essay has sparked many debates between scholars. Below are three quotes which encapsulate his notion for the death of the author:

“The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.”

“The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.”

“It is language which speaks, not the author.”

He called for the death of the author as an authority figure to allow the reader to be no longer restricted to an inferior and passive position. He differentiated between the “readerly text”, whereby the reader is the passive receiver of a predetermined meaning set by the author, and the “writerly text”, in which the reader plays an active part in their reading process.

“Authority figures are generally frowned upon in Postmodernism, and the notion of the author as a cultural icon has accordingly been challenged.”
The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism (Taylor, 2001)

Published Works

• Mythologies. trans. Annette Lavers, London: Jonathan Cape, 1972.
• Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. trans. Richard Howard, London: Macmillian, 1977.
• Writing Degree Zero. trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, London: Jonathan Cape, 1984.
• Pleasure of the Text. trans. Richard Miller, Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.
• S/Z. trans. Richard Miller, Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.