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89-520: Roland Gérard Barthes ( / b ɑːr t / ; French: [ʁɔlɑ̃ baʁt] ; 12 November 1915 – 26 March 1980) was a French literary theorist , essayist , philosopher , critic , and semiotician . His work engaged in the analysis of a variety of sign systems , mainly derived from Western popular culture . His ideas explored a diverse range of fields and influenced the development of many schools of theory, including structuralism , anthropology , literary theory , and post-structuralism . Barthes

178-703: A Pulitzer prize , the Academy of Arts and Letters Literary Award and a MacArthur Fellowship . In 1985, Howard received the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation . A past Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets , he was a Professor of Practice in the writing program at Columbia's School of the Arts . He was previously University Professor of English at the University of Houston and, before that, Ropes Professor of Comparative Literature at

267-451: A close reading . In fact, as much contention as there is between formalism and later schools, they share the tenet that the author's interpretation of a work is no more inherently meaningful than any other. Listed below are some of the most commonly identified schools of literary theory, along with their major authors: Richard Howard Richard Joseph Howard (October 13, 1929 – March 31, 2022), adopted as Richard Joseph Orwitz ,

356-1018: A " text ". However, some theorists acknowledge that these texts do not have a singular, fixed meaning which is deemed "correct". Since theorists of literature often draw on very heterogeneous traditions of Continental philosophy and the philosophy of language , any classification of their approaches is only an approximation. There are many types of literary theory, which take different approaches to texts. Broad schools of theory that have historically been important include historical and biographical criticism , New Criticism , formalism , Russian formalism , and structuralism , post-structuralism , Marxism or historical materialism , feminism and French feminism , post-colonialism , new historicism , deconstruction , reader-response criticism , narratology and psychoanalytic criticism. The different interpretive and epistemological perspectives of different schools of theory often arise from, and so give support to, different moral and political commitments. For instance,

445-479: A "fashion word" that provides the illusion of a grounded discourse. This theory has influenced the work of other thinkers such as Jerome Bel. Throughout his career, Barthes had an interest in photography and its potential to communicate actual events. Many of his monthly myth articles in the 1950s had attempted to show how a photographic image could represent implied meanings and thus be used by bourgeois culture to infer 'naturalistic truths'. But he still considered

534-454: A certain cultural phenomenon, being interested in his control over his readership. This turn of events caused him to question the overall utility of demystifying culture for the masses, thinking it might be a fruitless attempt, and drove him deeper in his search for individualistic meaning in art. As Barthes's work with structuralism began to flourish around the time of his debates with Picard, his investigation of structure focused on revealing

623-543: A characteristic and—as I see it—consequential identity since the time, say, of the Korean War ." Howard would later tell an interviewer I wrote the book not for the sense of history, but for myself, knowing that a relation to one's moment was essential to getting beyond the moment. As I quoted Shaw in the book's preface, if you cannot believe in the greatness of your own age and inheritance, you will fall into confusion of mind and contrariety of spirit. The book

712-592: A critical distance and learn from his errors, since understanding how and why his thinking is flawed will show more about his period of history than his own observations. Similarly, Barthes felt that avant-garde writing should be praised for its maintenance of just such a distance between its audience and itself. In presenting an obvious artificiality rather than making claims to great subjective truths, Barthes argued, avant-garde writers ensure that their audiences maintain an objective perspective. In this sense, Barthes believed that art should be critical and should interrogate

801-472: A document known as the "Seventh Function of Language". Literary theory The practice of literary theory became a profession in the 20th century, but it has historical roots that run as far back as ancient Greece ( Aristotle 's Poetics is an often cited early example), ancient India ( Bharata Muni 's Natya Shastra ), and ancient Rome ( Longinus 's On the Sublime ). In medieval times, scholars in

890-409: A figure Barthes calls the "scriptor," whose only power is to combine pre-existing texts in new ways. Barthes believes that all writing draws on previous texts, norms, and conventions, and that these are the things to which the reader must turn to understand a text. As a way of asserting the relative unimportance of the writer's biography compared to these textual and generic conventions, Barthes says that

979-748: A new translation into English (by Richard Howard) of Barthes's little known work What is Sport . This work bears a considerable resemblance to Mythologies and was originally commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as the text for a documentary film directed by Hubert Aquin . In February 2009, Éditions du Seuil published Journal de deuil (Journal of Mourning), based on Barthes's files written from 26 November 1977 (the day following his mother's death) up to 15 September 1979, intimate notes on his terrible loss: The (awesome but not painful) idea that she had not been everything to me. Otherwise I would never have written

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1068-400: A picture creates a falseness in the illusion of 'what is', where 'what was' would be a more accurate description. As had been made physical through Henriette Barthes's death, her childhood photograph is evidence of 'what has ceased to be'. Instead of making reality solid, it serves as a reminder of the world's ever changing nature. Because of this there is something uniquely personal contained in

1157-496: A pursuit. The lover's attempts to assert himself into a false, ideal reality is involved in a delusion that exposes the contradictory logic inherent in such a search. Yet at the same time the novelistic character is a sympathetic one, and is thus open not just to criticism but also understanding from the reader. The result is one that challenges the reader's views of social constructs of love, without trying to assert any definitive theory of meaning. Barthes also attempted to reinterpret

1246-560: A reputation for himself. He traveled to the US and Japan , delivering a presentation at Johns Hopkins University . During this time, he wrote his best-known work, the 1967 essay " The Death of the Author ," which, in light of the growing influence of Jacques Derrida 's deconstruction , would prove to be a transitional piece in its investigation of the logical ends of structuralist thought. Barthes continued to contribute with Philippe Sollers to

1335-537: A review of Barthes's diary of a trip to China during the Cultural Revolution , disparages Barthes for his seeming indifference to the situation of the Chinese people, and says that Barthes "has contrived—amazingly—to bestow an entirely new dignity upon the age-old activity, so long unjustly disparaged, of saying nothing at great length." Barthes's A Lover's Discourse: Fragments was the inspiration for

1424-480: A specific kind of character or 'action'. By breaking down the work into such fundamental distinctions Barthes was able to judge the degree of realism given functions have in forming their actions and consequently with what authenticity a narrative can be said to reflect on reality. Thus, his structuralist theorizing became another exercise in his ongoing attempts to dissect and expose the misleading mechanisms of bourgeois culture. While Barthes found structuralism to be

1513-558: A student and spent the period from 1935 to 1939 at the Sorbonne , where he earned a licence in classical literature. He was plagued by ill health throughout this period, suffering from tuberculosis , which often had to be treated in the isolation of sanatoria . His repeated physical breakdowns disrupted his academic career, affecting his studies and his ability to take qualifying examinations. They also exempted him from military service during World War II . His life from 1939 to 1948

1602-475: A transitional phase for Barthes in his continuing effort to find significance in culture outside of the bourgeois norms . Indeed, the notion of the author being irrelevant was already a factor of structuralist thinking. Since Barthes contends that there can be no originating anchor of meaning in the possible intentions of the author, he considers what other sources of meaning or significance can be found in literature. He concludes that since meaning can't come from

1691-409: A useful tool and believed that discourse of literature could be formalized, he did not believe it could become a strict scientific endeavour. In the late 1960s, radical movements were taking place in literary criticism. The post-structuralist movement and the deconstructionism of Jacques Derrida were testing the bounds of the structuralist theory that Barthes's work exemplified. Derrida identified

1780-399: A work. Since my taking care of her for six months long, she actually had become everything for me, and I totally forgot of ever have written anything at all. I was nothing more than hopelessly hers. Before that she had made herself transparent so that I could write.... Mixing-up of roles. For months long I had been her mother. I felt like I had lost a daughter. He grieved his mother's death for

1869-591: A writer's form is vulnerable to becoming a convention once it has been made available to the public. This means that creativity is an ongoing process of continual change and reaction. In Michelet , a critical analysis of the French historian Jules Michelet , Barthes developed these notions, applying them to a broader range of fields. He argued that Michelet's views of history and society are obviously flawed. In studying his writings, he continued, one should not seek to learn from Michelet's claims; rather, one should maintain

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1958-400: Is contradicted by certain realities (i.e., that wine can be unhealthy and inebriating). He found semiotics , the study of signs , useful in these interrogations. He developed a theory of signs to demonstrate this perceived deception. He suggested that the construction of myths results in two levels of signification: the "language-object", a first order linguistic system; and the "metalanguage",

2047-400: Is intentionality, the amount of weight given to the author's own opinions about and intentions for a work. For most pre-20th century approaches, the author's intentions are a guiding factor and an important determiner of the "correct" interpretation of texts. The New Criticism was the first school to disavow the role of the author in interpreting texts, preferring to focus on "the text itself" in

2136-427: Is mainly found in these theoretical fields with which his work brought him into contact, it is also felt in every field concerned with the representation of information and models of communication, including computers, photography, music, and literature. One consequence of Barthes's breadth of focus is that his legacy includes no following of thinkers dedicated to modeling themselves after him. The fact that Barthes's work

2225-484: Is perhaps best known for his 1957 essay collection Mythologies , which contained reflections on popular culture, and the 1967/1968 essay " The Death of the Author ", which critiqued traditional approaches in literary criticism . During his academic career he was primarily associated with the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and the Collège de France . Roland Barthes was born on 12 November 1915 in

2314-403: Is purely personal and dependent on the individual, that which 'pierces the viewer' (which he called the punctum), Barthes was troubled by the fact that such distinctions collapse when personal significance is communicated to others and can have its symbolic logic rationalized. Barthes found the solution to this fine line of personal meaning in the form of his mother's picture. Barthes explained that

2403-603: The Mythologies collection that was published in 1957). Consisting of fifty-four short essays, mostly written between 1954 and 1956, Mythologies were acute reflections of French popular culture ranging from an analysis on soap detergents to a dissection of popular wrestling. Knowing little English, Barthes taught at Middlebury College in 1957 and befriended the future English translator of much of his work, Richard Howard , that summer in New York City. Barthes spent

2492-539: The Pulitzer Prize for poetry for his 1969 collection Untitled Subjects , which took for its subject dramatic imagined letters and monologues of 19th-century historical figures. For much of his career, Howard composed poems employing a quantitative verse technique. A prolific literary critic, Howard's monumental 1969 volume Alone With America stretches to 594 pages and profiles 41 American poets who had published at least two books each and "have come into

2581-534: The University of Cincinnati . He served as Poet Laureate of the State of New York from 1993 to 1995. In 1982, Howard was named a Chevalier of L'Ordre National du Mérite by the government of France. In 2016, he received the Philolexian Society Award for Distinguished Literary Achievement. Howard died in New York City on March 31, 2022, from complications of dementia. Richard Howard

2670-439: The University of Geneva . In those same years he became primarily associated with the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). In 1975 he wrote an autobiography titled Roland Barthes and in 1977 he was elected to the chair of Sémiologie Littéraire at the Collège de France . In the same year, his mother, Henriette Barthes, to whom he had been devoted, died, aged 85. They had lived together for 60 years. The loss of

2759-538: The avant-garde literary magazine Tel Quel , which was developing similar kinds of theoretical inquiry to that pursued in Barthes's writings. In 1970, Barthes produced what many consider to be his most prodigious work, the dense, critical reading of Balzac 's Sarrasine entitled S/Z . Throughout the 1970s, Barthes continued to develop his literary criticism; he developed new ideals of textuality and novelistic neutrality. In 1971, he served as visiting professor at

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2848-410: The mind–body dualism theory. Like Friedrich Nietzsche and Emmanuel Levinas , he also drew from Eastern philosophical traditions in his critique of European culture as "infected" by Western metaphysics. His body theory emphasized the formation of the self through bodily cultivation. The theory, which is also described as ethico-political entity, considers the idea of the body as one that functions as

2937-406: The significance naturally imbued by their signifiers. Such a society contrasts greatly to the one he dissected in Mythologies , which was revealed to be always asserting a greater, more complex significance on top of the natural one. In the wake of this trip Barthes wrote what is largely considered to be his best-known work, the essay " The Death of the Author " (1967). Barthes saw the notion of

3026-502: The "writerly text is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system (Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages" (5). Thus reading becomes for Barthes "not a parasitical act, the reactive complement of a writing", but rather a "form of work" (10). Author and scriptor are terms Barthes uses to describe different ways of thinking about

3115-699: The 1980s and 1990s debates on the academic merits of theory as "the theory wars ". Proponents and critics of the turn to theory take different (and often conflicting) positions about what counts as a theory or what it means to theorize within/about/alongside literature or other cultural creations. One of the fundamental questions of literary theory is "what is literature ?" and "how should or do we read?" – although some contemporary theorists and literary scholars believe either that "literature" cannot be defined or that it can refer to any use of language . Specific theories are distinguished not only by their methods and conclusions, but even by how they create meaning in

3204-636: The Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye attempted to establish an approach for reconciling historical criticism and New Criticism while addressing concerns of early reader-response and numerous psychological and social approaches. His approach, laid out in his Anatomy of Criticism , was explicitly structuralist, relying on the assumption of an intertextual "order of words" and universality of certain structural types. His approach held sway in English literature programs for several decades but lost favor during

3293-541: The French New Criticism (a label that he inaccurately applied to Barthes) for its obscurity and lack of respect towards France's literary roots. Barthes's rebuttal in Criticism and Truth (1966) accused the old, bourgeois criticism of a lack of concern with the finer points of language and of selective ignorance towards challenging theories, such as Marxism . By the late 1960s, Barthes had established

3382-562: The Marxist would say that the New Critical reading did not keep enough. Or a post-structuralist critic might simply avoid the issue by understanding the religious meaning of a poem as an allegory of meaning, treating the poem's references to "God" by discussing their referential nature rather than what they refer to. Such a disagreement cannot be easily resolved, because it is inherent in the radically different terms and goals (that is,

3471-542: The Middle East ( Al-Jahiz 's al-Bayan wa-'l-tabyin and al-Hayawan , and ibn al-Mu'tazz 's Kitab al-Badi ) and Europe continued to produce works based on literary studies. The aesthetic theories of philosophers from ancient philosophy through the 18th and 19th centuries are important influences on current literary study. The theory and criticism of literature are tied to the history of literature . Some scholars, both theoretical and anti-theoretical, refer to

3560-529: The absence of a search for a transcendental signifier. He notes that in Japan there is no emphasis on a great focus point by which to judge all other standards, describing the centre of Tokyo , the Emperor's Palace , as not a great overbearing entity, but a silent and nondescript presence, avoided and unconsidered. As such, Barthes reflects on the ability of signs in Japan to exist for their own merit, retaining only

3649-412: The ascendance of post-structuralism. For some theories of literature (especially certain kinds of formalism), the distinction between "literary" and other sorts of texts is of paramount importance. Other schools (particularly post-structuralism in its various forms: new historicism, deconstruction, some strains of Marxism and feminism) have sought to break down distinctions between the two and have applied

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3738-517: The author, it must be actively created by the reader through a process of textual analysis. In his S/Z (1970), Barthes applies this notion in an analysis of Sarrasine , a Balzac novella. The result was a reading that established five major codes for determining various kinds of significance, with numerous lexias throughout the text – a " lexia " here being defined as a unit of the text chosen arbitrarily (to remain methodologically unbiased as possible) for further analysis. The codes led him to define

3827-423: The author, or authorial authority, in the criticism of literary text as the forced projection of an ultimate meaning of the text. By imagining an ultimate intended meaning of a piece of literature one could infer an ultimate explanation for it. But Barthes points out that the great proliferation of meaning in language and the unknowable state of the author's mind makes any such ultimate realization impossible. As such,

3916-492: The best method for creating neutral writing, and he decided to try to create a novelistic form of rhetoric that would not seek to impose its meaning on the reader. One product of this endeavor was A Lover's Discourse: Fragments in 1977, in which he presents the fictionalized reflections of a lover seeking to identify and be identified by an anonymous amorous other. The unrequited lover's search for signs by which to show and receive love makes evident illusory myths involved in such

4005-659: The bourgeoisie relate it to a new signified: the idea of healthy, robust, relaxing experience. Motivations for such manipulations vary, from a desire to sell products to a simple desire to maintain the status quo . These insights brought Barthes in line with similar Marxist theory. Barthes used the term "myth" while analyzing the popular, consumer culture of post-war France in order to reveal that "objects were organized into meaningful relationships via narratives that expressed collective cultural values." In The Fashion System Barthes showed how this adulteration of signs could easily be translated into words. In this work he explained how in

4094-459: The character of Consuela (played by Penélope Cruz ) is first depicted in the film carrying a copy of Barthes's The Pleasure of the Text on the campus of the university where she is a student. Laurent Binet 's novel The 7th Function of Language is based on the premise that Barthes was not merely accidentally hit by a van driver but that he was instead murdered, as part of a conspiracy to acquire

4183-405: The creators of texts. "The author" is the traditional concept of the lone genius creating a work of literature or other piece of writing by the powers of his/her original imagination. For Barthes, such a figure is no longer viable. The insights offered by an array of modern thought, including the insights of Surrealism , have rendered the term obsolete. In place of the author, the modern world offers

4272-416: The difficulty of achieving truly neutral writing, which required an avoidance of any labels that might carry an implied meaning or identity towards a given object. Even carefully crafted neutral writing could be taken in an assertive context through the incidental use of a word with a loaded social context. Barthes felt his past works, like Mythologies , had suffered from this. He became interested in finding

4361-418: The early 1960s exploring the fields of semiology and structuralism , chairing various faculty positions around France, and continuing to produce more full-length studies. Many of his works challenged traditional academic views of literary criticism and of renowned figures of literature. His unorthodox thinking led to a conflict with a well-known Sorbonne professor of literature, Raymond Picard , who attacked

4450-417: The elementary pieces of a work, such as a single descriptive word that can be used to identify a character. That character would be an 'action', and consequently one of the elements that make up the narrative. Barthes was able to use these distinctions to evaluate how certain key 'functions' work in forming characters. For example, key words like 'dark', 'mysterious' and 'odd', when integrated together, formulate

4539-404: The entire premise of structuralism as a means of evaluating writing (or anything) is hollow. Such thought led Barthes to consider the limitations not just of signs and symbols, but also of Western culture's dependency on beliefs of constancy and ultimate standards. He travelled to Japan in 1966 where he wrote Empire of Signs (published in 1970), a meditation on Japanese culture's contentment in

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4628-481: The fashion world any word could be loaded with idealistic bourgeois emphasis. Thus, if popular fashion says that a 'blouse' is ideal for a certain situation or ensemble, this idea is immediately naturalized and accepted as truth, even though the actual sign could just as easily be interchangeable with 'skirt', 'vest' or any number of combinations. In the end Barthes's Mythologies became absorbed into bourgeois culture, as he found many third parties asking him to comment on

4717-425: The flaw of structuralism as its reliance on a transcendental signifier; a symbol of constant, universal meaning would be essential as an orienting point in such a closed off system. This is to say that without some regular standard of measurement, a system of criticism that references nothing outside of the actual work itself could never prove useful. But since there are no symbols of constant and universal significance,

4806-545: The flowers from withering away." In 2012 the book Travels in China was published. It consists of his notes from a three-week trip to China he undertook with a group from the literary journal Tel Quel in 1974. The experience left him somewhat disappointed, as he found China "not at all exotic, not at all disorienting". Roland Barthes's criticism contributed to the development of theoretical schools such as structuralism , semiotics , and post-structuralism . While his influence

4895-511: The importance of language in writing, which he felt was overlooked by old criticism. Barthes's "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative" is concerned with examining the correspondence between the structure of a sentence and that of a larger narrative, thus allowing narrative to be viewed along linguistic lines. Barthes split this work into three hierarchical levels: 'functions', 'actions' and 'narrative'. 'Functions' are

4984-563: The late 1970s, Barthes was increasingly concerned with the conflict of two types of language: that of popular culture, which he saw as limiting and pigeonholing in its titles and descriptions, and neutral, which he saw as open and noncommittal. He called these two conflicting modes the Doxa (the official and unacknowledged systems of meaning through which culture is absorbed)) and the Para-doxa . While Barthes had sympathized with Marxist thought in

5073-506: The leftist Parisian paper Combat , out of which grew his first full-length work, Writing Degree Zero (1953). In 1952, Barthes settled at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique , where he studied lexicology and sociology . During his seven-year period there, he began to write a popular series of bi-monthly essays for the magazine Les Lettres Nouvelles , in which he dismantled myths of popular culture (gathered in

5162-480: The name of 1980s new wave duo The Lover Speaks . Jeffrey Eugenides ' The Marriage Plot draws out excerpts from Barthes's A Lover's Discourse: Fragments as a way to depict the unique intricacies of love that one of the main characters, Madeleine Hanna, experiences throughout the novel. In the film Birdman (2014) by Alejandro González Iñárritu , a journalist quotes to the protagonist Riggan Thompson an extract from Mythologies : "The cultural work done in

5251-414: The past (or at least parallel criticisms), he felt that, despite its anti-ideological stance, Marxist theory was just as guilty of using violent language with assertive meanings, as was bourgeois literature. In this way they were both Doxa and both culturally assimilating. As a reaction to this, he wrote The Pleasure of the Text (1975), a study that focused on a subject matter he felt was equally outside

5340-449: The past by gods and epic sagas is now done by laundry-detergent commercials and comic-strip characters". In the film The Truth About Cats & Dogs (1996) by Michael Lehmann , Brian is reading an extract from Camera Lucida over the phone to someone he thinks to be a beautiful woman but is actually her more intellectual and less physically desirable friend. In the film Elegy , based on Philip Roth 's novel The Dying Animal ,

5429-448: The photograph of Barthes's mother that cannot be removed from his subjective state: the recurrent feeling of loss experienced whenever he looks at it. As one of his final works before his death, Camera Lucida was both an ongoing reflection on the complicated relations between subjectivity, meaning and cultural society as well as a touching dedication to his mother and description of the depth of his grief. A posthumous collection of essays

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5518-413: The photograph to have a unique potential for presenting a completely real representation of the world. When his mother, Henriette Barthes, died in 1977 he began writing Camera Lucida as an attempt to explain the unique significance a picture of her as a child carried for him. Reflecting on the relationship between the obvious symbolic meaning of a photograph (which he called the studium) and that which

5607-462: The principle of non-contradiction" (156), that is, they do not disturb the "common sense," or "Doxa," of the surrounding culture. The "readerly texts," moreover, "are products [that] make up the enormous mass of our literature" (5). Within this category, there is a spectrum of "replete literature," which comprises "any classic (readerly) texts" that work "like a cupboard where meanings are shelved, stacked, [and] safeguarded" (200). A text that aspires to

5696-410: The proper goal of literature and criticism: "... to make the reader no longer a consumer but a producer of the text" (4). Writerly texts and ways of reading constitute, in short, an active rather than passive way of interacting with a culture and its texts. A culture and its texts, Barthes writes, should never be accepted in their given forms and traditions. As opposed to the "readerly texts" as "product,"

5785-460: The realm of both conservative society and militant leftist thinking: hedonism . By writing about a subject that was rejected by both social extremes of thought, Barthes felt he could avoid the dangers of the limiting language of the Doxa. The theory he developed out of this focus claimed that, while reading for pleasure is a kind of social act, through which the reader exposes him/herself to the ideas of

5874-400: The rest of his life: "Do not say mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not in mourning. I'm suffering." and "In the corner of my room where she had been bedridden, where she had died and where I now sleep, in the wall where her headboard had stood against I hung an icon—not out of faith. And I always put some flowers on a table. I do not wish to travel anymore so that I may stay here and prevent

5963-404: The restrictive devices that Sarrasine suffered from such as strict timelines and exact definitions of events. He describes this as the difference between the writerly text, in which the reader is active in a creative process, and a readerly text in which they are restricted to just reading. The project helped Barthes identify what it was he sought in literature: an openness for interpretation. In

6052-462: The scriptor has no past, but is born with the text. He also argues that, in the absence of the idea of an "author-God" to control the meaning of a work, interpretive horizons are opened up considerably for the active reader. As Barthes puts it, "the death of the author is the birth of the reader." In 1964, Barthes wrote "The Last Happy Writer" (" Le dernier des écrivains heureux " in Essais critiques ),

6141-427: The second-order system transmitting the myth. The former pertains to the literal or explicit meaning of things while the latter is composed of the language used to speak about the first order. Barthes explained that these bourgeois cultural myths were "second-order signs," or " connotations ." A picture of a full, dark bottle is a signifier that relates to a specific "signified": a fermented, alcoholic beverage. However,

6230-444: The story as having a capacity for plurality of meaning, limited by its dependence upon strictly sequential elements (such as a definite timeline that has to be followed by the reader and thus restricts their freedom of analysis). From this project Barthes concludes that an ideal text is one that is reversible, or open to the greatest variety of independent interpretations and not restrictive in meaning. A text can be reversible by avoiding

6319-565: The streets of Paris. One month later, on 26 March, he died from the chest injuries he had sustained in the crash. Barthes's earliest ideas reacted to the trend of existentialist philosophy that was prominent in France during the 1940s, specifically to the figurehead of existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre . Sartre's What Is Literature? (1947) expresses a disenchantment both with established forms of writing and more experimental, avant-garde forms, which he feels alienate readers. Barthes's response

6408-508: The text itself. These terms are most explicitly fleshed out in S/Z , while the essay "From Work to Text", from Image—Music—Text (1977), provides an analogous parallel look at the active–passive and postmodern–modern ways of interacting with a text. A text that makes no requirement of the reader to "write" or "produce" their own meanings. The reader may passively locate "ready-made" meaning. Barthes writes that these sorts of texts are "controlled by

6497-468: The theories) of the critics. Their theories of reading derive from vastly different intellectual traditions: the New Critic bases his work on an East-Coast American scholarly and religious tradition, while the Marxist derives his thought from a body of critical social and economic thought, the post-structuralist's work emerges from twentieth-century Continental philosophy of language. In the late 1950s,

6586-559: The title of which refers to Voltaire . In the essay he commented on the problems of the modern thinker after discovering the relativism in thought and philosophy, discrediting previous philosophers who avoided this difficulty. Disagreeing roundly with Barthes's description of Voltaire, Daniel Gordon, the translator and editor of Candide (The Bedford Series in History and Culture), wrote that "never has one brilliant writer so thoroughly misunderstood another." The sinologist Simon Leys , in

6675-425: The tools of textual interpretation to a wide range of "texts", including film, non-fiction, historical writing, and even cultural events. Mikhail Bakhtin argued that the "utter inadequacy" of literary theory is evident when it is forced to deal with the novel ; while other genres are fairly stabilized, the novel is still developing. Another crucial distinction among the various theories of literary interpretation

6764-572: The town of Cherbourg in Normandy . His father, naval officer Louis Barthes, was killed in a battle during World War I in the North Sea before Barthes's first birthday. His mother, Henriette Barthes, and his aunt and grandmother raised him in the village of Urt and the city of Bayonne . In 1924, Barthes' family moved to Paris , though his attachment to his provincial roots would remain strong throughout his life. Barthes showed great promise as

6853-463: The whole notion of the 'knowable text' acts as little more than another delusion of Western bourgeois culture. Indeed, the idea of giving a book or poem an ultimate end coincides with the notion of making it consumable, something that can be used up and replaced in a capitalist market. "The Death of the Author" is considered to be a post-structuralist work, since it moves past the conventions of trying to quantify literature, but others see it as more of

6942-424: The woman who had raised and cared for him was a serious blow to Barthes. His last major work, Camera Lucida , is partly an essay about the nature of photography and partly a meditation on photographs of his mother. The book contains many reproductions of photographs, though none of them are of Henriette. On 25 February 1980, Roland Barthes was knocked down by the driver of a laundry van while walking home through

7031-463: The work of the New Critics often contained an implicit moral dimension, and sometimes even a religious one: a New Critic might read a poem by T. S. Eliot or Gerard Manley Hopkins for its degree of honesty in expressing the torment and contradiction of a serious search for belief in the modern world. Meanwhile, a Marxist critic might find such judgments merely ideological rather than critical;

7120-414: The world, rather than seek to explain it, as Michelet had done. Barthes's many monthly contributions, collected in his Mythologies (1957), frequently interrogated specific cultural materials in order to expose how bourgeois society asserted its values through them. For example, Barthes cited the portrayal of wine in French society. Its description as a robust and healthy habit is a bourgeois ideal that

7209-506: The writer, the final cathartic climax of this pleasurable reading, which he termed the bliss in reading or jouissance , is a point in which one becomes lost within the text. This loss of self within the text or immersion in the text, signifies a final impact of reading that is experienced outside the social realm and free from the influence of culturally associative language and is thus neutral with regard to social progress. Despite this newest theory of reading, Barthes remained concerned with

7298-461: Was out to some degree since at least the 1960s, when he remarked to friend W. H. Auden that he was offended by a fellow poet's use of Jewish and gay epithets, "since [he was] both these things", to which Auden replied, "My dear, I never knew you were Jewish!" Howard was renowned for the extreme number of books that he had collected over his lifetime and which famously lined the walls of his New York City apartment. Additionally, he kept on his bed,

7387-579: Was a rescuing anatomy of such belief, the construction of a credendum —articles of faith, or at least appreciation. He was awarded the PEN Translation Prize in 1976 for his translation of E. M. Cioran 's A Short History of Decay and the National Book Award for his 1983 translation of Baudelaire 's Les Fleurs du mal . He was the longest-serving Poetry Editor of The Paris Review , from 1992 until 2005. He received

7476-570: Was an American poet, literary critic , essayist, teacher, and translator. He was born in Cleveland , Ohio, and was a graduate of Columbia University , where he studied under Mark Van Doren , and where he was an emeritus professor. He lived in New York City . After reading French letters at the Sorbonne in 1952–53, Howard had a brief early career as a lexicographer . He soon turned his attention to poetry and poetic criticism, and won

7565-448: Was born to poor Jewish parents. His last name at birth is unknown. He was adopted as an infant by Emma Joseph and Harry Orwitz, a middle-class Cleveland couple, who were also Jewish; his mother changed their last names to "Howard" when he was an infant after she divorced Orwitz. Howard never met his birth parents, nor his sister, who was adopted by another local family. Howard was gay, a fact that comes up frequently in his later work. He

7654-414: Was ever adapting and refuting notions of stability and constancy means there is no canon of thought within his theory to model one's thoughts upon, and thus no "Barthesism". Readerly and writerly are terms Barthes employs both to delineate one type of literature from another and to implicitly interrogate ways of reading, like positive or negative habits the modern reader brings into one's experience with

7743-609: Was largely spent obtaining a licence in grammar and philology , publishing his first papers, taking part in a medical study, and continuing to struggle with his health. He received a diplôme d'études supérieures (roughly equivalent to an MA by thesis) from the University of Paris in 1941 for his work in Greek tragedy . In 1948, he returned to purely academic work, gaining numerous short-term positions at institutes in France , Romania , and Egypt . During this time, he contributed to

7832-567: Was published in 1987 by François Wahl , Incidents . It contains fragments from his journals: his Soirées de Paris (a 1979 extract from his erotic diary of life in Paris); an earlier diary he kept which explicitly detailed his paying for sex with men and boys in Morocco; and Light of the Sud Ouest (his childhood memories of rural French life). In November 2007, Yale University Press published

7921-401: Was to try to discover that which may be considered unique and original in writing. In Writing Degree Zero (1953), Barthes argues that conventions inform both language and style, rendering neither purely creative. Instead, form, or what Barthes calls "writing" (the specific way an individual chooses to manipulate conventions of style for a desired effect), is the unique and creative act. However,

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