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Roland Barthes (1915-1980). Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist, critic, and semiotician .
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Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist, critic, and semiotician. • His ideas were applied to a diverse range of fields, thus influenced the development of various schools of thoughtsuch asstructuralism, semiotics, social theory, anthropology and post-structuralism. • Some of his well-known works are;
Though Barthes was originally a structuralist, during the 1960s he grew increasingly favorable to post-structuralist views. • Roland Barthes's post-structuralist period is best represented in his essay 'The Death of the Author‘. • In 1968, Barthes published “The Death of the Author” in the American journal Aspen. • The essay later appeared in an anthology of his essays, Image-Music-Text (1977).
Until then, an author was an unproblematic concept; an author was someone who wrote a book. • Roland Barthes' landmark essay, "The Death of the Author," however, demonstrates that an author is not simply a "person" but a socially and historically constituted subject.
Barthes emphasizes that an author does not exist prior to or outside of language. In other words, it is writing that makes an author and not vice versa. • «The writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix discourses in such a way as never to rest on any one of them" . • Thusthe author cannot claim any absolute authority over his or her text because, in some ways, he or she did not «write»it.
Barthes throws the emphasis away from a subject called the «author» as the site of production but puts emphasis on to language and, in so doing, hopes to liberate writing from the despotism of what he calls «the work»or what we have called a «book». • Therefore, it seems that there is a «hypertext»as realizing Barthes' utopian dreams of a writing liberated from the author.
The ability for each reader to add to, alter, or simply edit a hypertext opens possibilities of collective authorship that breaks down the idea of writing as originating from a single fixed source. • Similarly, the ability to plot out unique patterns of reading, to move through a text in anon-linear fashion, serves to highlight the importance of the reader in the "writing" of a text--each reading, even if it does not physically change the words--writes the text anew simply by re-arranging it, by placing different emphases that might subtly inflect its meanings.
The Author may be dead, but his «ghosts»maybe even more eloquent. • In other words,the privileged discourse of the narrator is thus replaced by "a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash».
On the other hand, Barthes points out, just like Derrida, that there is no original discourse for anyone. • For example, in Fragments: ALover’s Discourse(1990), Barthes is concerned to describe the structures within whichindividuals in love are at the mercy of the tropes, moods, emotions, gestures, tones of voice which the discourse of the lover lays out for them.
Barthes considers all of these structured elements to constitute what hecalls ‘fragments’, which make up the discourse as a whole. • Barthes’ experiment withdescribing the discursive structures of love has wider implications for theanalysis of discourse as a whole. The fragment as a constituent part ofdiscourse is certainly a suggestive way of mapping out these structures.
Mythologies is a book by Roland Barthes, published in 1957. • It is a collection of essays taken from Les Lettresnouvelles, examining the tendency of contemporary social value systems to create modern myths. • Barthes refers to the tendency of socially constructed notions, narratives, and assumptions to become "naturalised" in the process, that is, taken unquestioningly as given within a particular culture.
Barthes finishes Mythologies by looking at how and why mythologies are built up by the powerin its various manifestations. • He returns to this theme in later works including The Fashion System. • What is a «myth»today? • It is a form of language and determines how language forms an alternative reality. • We usually associate myths with classical fables about the exploits of gods and heroes. But for Barthes myths are the dominant ideologies of our time.
«I am at the barber's, and a copy of Paris-Match is offered to me. On the cover, a young Negro* in a French uniform is saluting, with his eyes uplifted, probably fixed on a fold of the tricolour. All this is the meaning of the picture. But, whether naively or not, I see very well what it signifies to me: that France is a great Empire, that all her sons, without any colour discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag, and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by this Negro* in serving his so-called oppressors. I am therefore again faced with a greater semiological system: there is a signifier, itself already formed with a previous system (a black soldier is giving the French salute); there is a signified (it is here a purposeful mixture of Frenchness and militariness); finally, there is a presence of the signified through the signifier... In myth (and this is the chief peculiarity of the latter), the signifier is already formed by the signs of the language... Myth has in fact a double function: it points out and it notifies, it makes us understand something and it imposes it on us...»
Signs and codes are generated by myths and in turn serve to maintain them. • Popular usage of the term 'myth' suggests that it refers to beliefs which are demonstrably false, but the semiotic use of the term does not necessarily suggest this. • Myths can be seen as extended metaphors. Like metaphors, myths help us to make sense of our experiences within a culture.
