Roland Barthes (1915 – 1980) is an extremely prolific French semiotician, essayist, and literary and cultural critique, whose living and inspired works became especially important as semiology (or semiotics) entered the United States.
His books and essays make a significant contribution to the understanding of (according to Saussure‘s famous expression) “the life of signs in society.” His books include:
- The Zero Level of the Letter (1953)
- Mythologies (1957)
- Critical Essays (1964)
- The Fashion System (1967)
- S/Z (1970)
- The Pleasure of the Text (1973)
- Image-music-text (1977)
A central feature of Bart’s thought, adopted by Louis Hjelmslev in his notion of connotation, applies a wide range of semiotic phenomena, including the mass media, popular culture, style, fashion, literature, and photography.
Another important aspect of his approach, to which he devotes many identification codes, is the attention to the structuring of the literary text. Barthes believes that “resistance to declaring his (the text’s) codes characterizing bourgeois society and mass culture stems from that society itself: both (society and the text) require signs not to look like signs” (Barthes Reader, 287).
Barthes accepts as his task to show these codes and, in a sense, to destroy the power of these self-obliterating signs by explaining how they perform their activity.
Its purpose is to demythologize primarily the subconscious and therefore too powerful work of the myths through which society is controlled.
Another influential aspect of his thinking is the distinction between the reader’s and the written (written) text.
Readers’ texts are those that leave the reader with “too little freedom – either to accept or to reject the text”. They are objects for consumption rather than threads for weaving.
In contrast, written texts are those that clearly and effectively invite the reader to accept the role of co-author.
Respectively, Barthes draws another distinction between this – between a writer (scripteur, escrivant) and an author (escrivain).
Barthes sees the study of signs not so much as a discipline that could be transformed as a science, but as a tool for cultural criticism. They also try to do a number of other semiotics.
