biography
| name: |
Barthes, Roland (Gérard)
|
pronunciation:
[bah(r)t]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1915–80)
|
| biography:
| Writer, critic, and teacher, born in Cherbourg, NW France. After researching and teaching he began to write, and his collection of essays entitled Le Degré zéro de l'écriture (1953, trans Writing Degree Zero) immediately established him as France's leading critic of Modernist literature. Other works include Mythologies (1957). His literary criticism avoided the traditional value judgments and investigation of the author's intentions, addressing itself instead to analysis of the text as a system of signs whose underlying structure forms the ‘meaning’ of the work as a whole. For 16 years he was a member of the faculty of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, and from 1976 was professor of literary semiology at the Collège de France, gaining international recognition as a developer of semiology and structuralism. |
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