Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes was a French literary theorist, critic, and essayist born in Cherbourg in 1915 and died in Paris in 1980 after being struck by a laundry van. His father, a naval officer, was killed in the First World War when Roland was an infant, and he was raised in Bayonne and Paris by his mother in modest circumstances. Repeated bouts of tuberculosis kept him out of university for long stretches.

Barthes worked as a teacher in France, Romania, and Egypt, and as a researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, before joining the École Pratique des Hautes Études in 1962. His 1953 book Le Degré zéro de l'écriture argued that literary form is itself a political and historical choice, and his 1957 collection Mythologies, brief essays on wrestling, soap powders, and the new Citroën, dissected the everyday signs of postwar France through the tools of semiology.

Through the 1960s and 1970s he became a central figure of French structuralism and then of the post-structuralist turn that grew from it. His 1967 essay "The Death of the Author" displaced the writer's biography in favor of the play of the text, and books such as S/Z, The Pleasure of the Text, and A Lover's Discourse reshaped how literary theory was practiced in Europe and the Americas.

In 1977 he was elected to the chair of literary semiology at the Collège de France, the high point of an academic career he had reached by an unusually circuitous path. His last book, Camera Lucida, written in mourning for his mother, is a meditation on photography and grief.

The name Roland is of Old Frankish origin, from hrod meaning fame and land meaning land or territory, so glorious throughout the land. The medieval epic The Song of Roland made it a French heroic name. He wore it as the surname of a critic who turned reading into a public art.