Roland Barthes Biography Quotes 20 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Roland Gerard Barthes was born on 12 November 1915 in Cherbourg, France. His father, Louis Barthes, a naval officer, died in World War I when Roland was an infant, leaving his mother, Henriette Binger Barthes, as the central figure in his upbringing. He spent parts of his childhood in Bayonne before moving to Paris, where he showed early gifts for languages and classical culture. At the Sorbonne he studied classical letters, developing a lifelong attentiveness to rhetoric and the textures of writing. The intimacy and devotion between mother and son shaped both his daily life and the tone of his later meditations on love, mourning, and the memory of images.

Illness, Teaching, and Early Career
Beginning in the mid-1930s Barthes suffered recurring bouts of tuberculosis, experiences that sent him to sanatoria and interrupted the customary path toward the competitive agregation. These enforced pauses, though limiting, also opened a space for reflection on language, society, and the status of literature. He taught in lycees and worked abroad for France's cultural services, including postings in Bucharest and Alexandria, broadening his view of sign systems and everyday rituals. His return to Paris led to research positions, notably at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, where he pursued lexicology and the emerging field of semiology inspired by Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson.

Critic of Literature and Culture
Barthes's first major books announced a distinctive voice that bridged literature, philosophy, and social critique. "Le Degre zero de l ecriture" (1953) questioned the supposed neutrality of literary style and positioned writing within historical pressures. "Michelet par lui-meme" (1954) reimagined biography as a reading of desire and imagery in the historian Jules Michelet. With "Mythologies" (1957), a collection of short, incisive essays, Barthes exposed the ideological naturalizations at work in modern mass culture, from wrestling to advertising, showing how myths transform history into common sense. These early works openly dialogued with the existential climate of Jean-Paul Sartre while also seeking more precise analytical tools.

Structuralism, Semiology, and Debate
In the 1960s Barthes joined and helped shape structuralist debates by clarifying the analysis of signs and narratives. "Elements of Semiology" (1964) and essays on narrative codes extended Saussurean insights and intersected with the anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss. "Sur Racine" (1963) provoked a sharp controversy with the Sorbonne critic Raymond Picard, prompting Barthes's defense of modern criticism in "Critique et verite" (1966). He articulated one of the century's most influential critical gestures in the essay "The Death of the Author" (1967), shifting attention from authorial intention to the play of language and to the reader. "Systeme de la mode" (1967) applied semiological analysis to fashion descriptions, while "S/Z" (1970), a meticulous reading of Balzac's "Sarrasine", demonstrated how a text can be decomposed into codes and voices that resist closure.

Travel, Pleasure, and the Turn to the Self
Barthes's thought kept changing. "L Empire des signes" (1970), inspired by travel to Japan, treated a foreign culture as a space of estrangement and delight, a way to rethink Western categories. "The Pleasure of the Text" (1973) introduced the distinction between plaisir and jouissance, inviting readers to sense the grain of language and the erotics of reading. With "Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes" (1975) he experimented with self-portraiture as a series of fragments, images, and notes. "A Lover's Discourse: Fragments" (1977) distilled the language of romantic longing into brief, crystalline entries, mapping affect rather than constructing theory. These works resonated across circles that included Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Philippe Sollers, Julia Kristeva, Tzvetan Todorov, and Gerard Genette, with whom Barthes shared affinities and productive disagreements about the roles of language, power, and interpretation.

Teaching and Institutions
From the 1960s, Barthes taught and directed studies at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, helping to institutionalize semiological and structural analysis in France. In 1977 he was elected to the College de France as Chair of Literary Semiology, a recognition that crowned his standing while giving him freedom to invent new forms of teaching. His celebrated courses ranged from "The Neutral" to "La Preparation du roman", in which he meditated on the desire to write a novel, invoking the example of Marcel Proust and the daily disciplines of attention required by artistic life. These seminars, open and conversational, gave students a model of inquiry that prized nuance, hesitation, and the careful calibration of concepts.

Mourning, Photography, and the Late Style
The death of his mother Henriette in 1977 marked a decisive turn. Barthes entered a period of grieving that sharpened his sensitivity to memory and the image. "Camera Lucida" (1980) was his last completed book, a meditation on photography that introduced the influential distinction between studium (the cultural field of interest) and punctum (the wounding detail that pricks the viewer). The book is impelled by his search for the "Winter Garden Photograph" of his mother, never reproduced in the text but central to its movement between theory and elegy. In this late style, analysis becomes intimate, and scholarship opens onto the ethics of attention, love, and mortality.

Death and Legacy
On 25 February 1980, shortly after a lunch in Paris that included Francois Mitterrand, Barthes was struck by a van and suffered injuries from which he did not recover. He died on 26 March 1980. Posthumous publications, including lectures such as "La Preparation du roman", attest to an intellect still in motion. Across literary studies, cultural theory, media and visual studies, his concepts and turns of phrase remain vital: the death of the author; the codes of reading; the grain of the voice; the neutral; the studium and punctum. He brought to Michelet, Racine, Balzac, and to everyday objects the same patient, inventive attention, and he offered critics a method equal parts rigor and tact. Among friends, colleagues, and interlocutors from Sartre to Foucault, Derrida, Sollers, and Kristeva, Barthes occupies a singular place as the critic who made the act of reading itself a form of thought about freedom, desire, and the forms of life.

Our collection contains 20 quotes who is written by Roland, under the main topics: Ethics & Morality - Truth - Justice - Art - Writing.

Other people realated to Roland: Susan Sontag (Author), Jean Baudrillard (Sociologist), Georges Bataille (Writer), Italo Calvino (Journalist), Barbara Johnson (Critic), Terry Eagleton (Critic)