Roland Barthes was born in Cherbough, Manche (1915-1980). He was a philosopher, writer, essayist and French semiotician. His father died in a naval battle in Barthes' infancy, forcing his mother to move to Bayonne. Life became difficult for them when Barthes mother had an illegitimate child, for their grandparents refused to give her financial aid, and so she took work as a bookbinder. Barthes was able to continue his studies at the Sorbonne, in classical letters, grammar and philology (receiving a degrees in 1939 and 1943 respectively), and Greek tragedy. |
in his early work, Barthes was a structuralist and semiotician, influenced by the writings of Ferdinand de Saussure's study of signs and signification.
He wrote on popular phenomena from soap-ads to wrestling, articles that originally appeared in Le Monde, which perhaps inspired him to conflate elements of what had been perceived as high or low culture. His interest in popular media and events was due in part to what he saw as an abuse in such phenomena of ideology. Barthes believed that the starting point for such works did not lay in the author's intentions of traditional value judgments, but by the texts produced, as systems unto themselves whose underlying structures form the "meaning of the work as a whole." His works had a diversity, applying semiotic theory and/or literary critique, looking to disrupt the French literary establishment, while other essays focused on more personal issues such as the text, music, love and photography.
In 1962, he was a Study director of signs sociology, symbols and representations during 18 years.
Barthes went so far as to question the extent to which one can know one's purpose or place of understanding apart from language, the written in relationship to its contrary in speech, "…for writing can tell the truth on language, but not the truth on the real…" (from Image-Music-Text, 1977). This strain of structural linguistics in Barthes' thought was developed in greater detail in S/Z (1970), an analysis of the fiction of Balzac's work, Sarrasine.
Barthes' primary thesis in S/Z demonstrates that the power of fiction lies in the products of artifice in the form of intriguing details, enigmas, and plausible actions rather than in the imitation of reality.
Barthes identified a series of five codes within the text of fiction that form the network of significations in the reader: the hermeneutic code (presentation of an enigma); the semic code (connotative meaning); the symbolic code; the proairetic code (the logic of actions), and the gnomic, or cultural code, which evokes a particular body of knowledge.
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