Roland Barthes was born on 12 November 1915 in the town ofCherbourg inNormandy.[5] His father, naval officer Louis Barthes, was killed in a battle duringWorld War I in theNorth Sea before Barthes's first birthday. His mother, Henriette Barthes, and his aunt and grandmother raised him in the village ofUrt and the city ofBayonne. In 1924, Barthes's family moved toParis,[6] though his attachment to his provincial roots would remain strong throughout his life.
Barthes showed great promise as a student and spent the period from 1935 to 1939 at theSorbonne, where he earned alicence in classical literature. He was plagued by ill health throughout this period, suffering fromtuberculosis, which often had to be treated in the isolation ofsanatoria.[7] His repeated physical breakdowns disrupted his academic career, affecting his studies and his ability to take qualifying examinations. They also exempted him frommilitary service duringWorld War II.
His life from 1939 to 1948 was largely spent obtaining alicence ingrammar andphilology, publishing his first papers, taking part in a medical study, and continuing to struggle with his health. He received adiplôme d'études supérieures (roughly equivalent to anMA by thesis) from theUniversity of Paris in 1941 for his work inGreek tragedy.[8]
In 1948, he returned to purely academic work, gaining multiple short-term positions at institutes inFrance,Romania, andEgypt. During this time, he contributed to the leftist Parisian paperCombat, out of which grew his first full-length work,Writing Degree Zero (1953).
In 1952, Barthes settled at theCentre National de la Recherche Scientifique, where he studiedlexicology andsociology. During his seven-year period there, he began to write a popular series of bi-monthly essays for the magazineLes Lettres Nouvelles, in which he dismantled myths ofpopular culture (gathered in theMythologies collection that was published in 1957). Consisting of fifty-four short essays, mostly written between 1954 and 1956,Mythologies were acute reflections of French popular culture ranging from an analysis on soap detergents to a dissection of popular wrestling.[9] Knowing little English, Barthes taught atMiddlebury College in 1957 and befriended the future English translator of much of his work,Richard Howard, that summer in New York City.[10]
Barthes spent the early 1960s exploring the fields ofsemiology andstructuralism, chairing various faculty positions around France, and continuing to produce more full-length studies. His works challenged traditional academic views ofliterary criticism and of renowned figures of literature. His unorthodox thinking led to a conflict with a well-known Sorbonne professor of literature,Raymond Picard, who attacked the FrenchNew Criticism (a label that he inaccurately applied to Barthes) for its obscurity and lack of respect towards France's literary roots. Barthes's rebuttal inCriticism and Truth (1966) accused the old,bourgeois criticism of a lack of concern with the finer points of language and of selective ignorance towards challenging theories, such asMarxism.
By the late 1960s, Barthes had established a reputation for himself. He traveled to theUS andJapan, delivering a presentation atJohns Hopkins University. During this time, he wrote his best-known work,[according to whom?] the 1967 essay "The Death of the Author," which, in light of the growing influence ofJacques Derrida'sdeconstruction, would prove to be a transitional piece in its investigation of the logical ends of structuralist thought.
Barthes continued to contribute withPhilippe Sollers to theavant-garde literary magazineTel Quel, which was developing similar kinds of theoretical inquiry to that pursued in Barthes's writings. In 1970, Barthes produced what some consider to be his most prodigious work,[who?] the dense, critical reading ofBalzac'sSarrasine entitledS/Z. Throughout the 1970s, Barthes continued to develop his literary criticism; he developed new ideals oftextuality and novelistic neutrality. In 1971, he served as visiting professor at theUniversity of Geneva. In those same years he became primarily associated with theÉcole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS).
In 1975 he wrote an autobiography titledRoland Barthes and in 1977 he was elected to the chair of Sémiologie Littéraire at theCollège de France. In the same year, his mother, Henriette Barthes, to whom he had been devoted, died, aged 85. They had lived together for 60 years. The loss of the woman who had raised and cared for him was a serious blow to Barthes. His last major work,Camera Lucida, is partly an essay about the nature ofphotography and partly a meditation on photographs of his mother. The book contains a number of reproductions of photographs, though none of them are of Henriette.
On 25 February 1980, Roland Barthes was knocked down by the driver of a laundry van while walking home through the streets of Paris. One month later, on 26 March,[11] he died from the resulting pulmonary complications.[3]
Barthes's earliest ideas reacted to the trend ofexistentialist philosophy that was prominent in France during the 1940s, specifically to the figurehead of existentialism,Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre'sWhat Is Literature? (1947) expresses a disenchantment both with established forms of writing and more experimental,avant-garde forms, which he feels alienate readers. Barthes's response was to try to discover that which may be considered unique and original in writing. InWriting Degree Zero (1953), Barthes argues that conventions inform both language and style, rendering neither purely creative. Instead, form, or what Barthes calls "writing" (the specific way an individual chooses to manipulate conventions of style for a desired effect), is the unique and creative act. However, a writer's form is vulnerable to becoming a convention once it has been made available to the public. This means that creativity is an ongoing process of continual change and reaction.
InMichelet, a critical analysis of the French historianJules Michelet, Barthes developed these notions, applying them to a broader range of fields. He argued that Michelet's views of history and society are obviously flawed. In studying his writings, he continued, one should not seek to learn from Michelet's claims; rather, one should maintain a critical distance and learn from his errors, since understanding how and why his thinking is flawed will show more about his period of history than his own observations. Similarly, Barthes felt thatavant-garde writing should be praised for its maintenance of just such a distance between its audience and itself. In presenting an obvious artificiality rather than making claims to great subjective truths, Barthes argued, avant-garde writers ensure that their audiences maintain an objective perspective. In this sense, Barthes believed that art should be critical and should interrogate the world, rather than seek to explain it, as Michelet had done.
Barthes's many monthly contributions, collected in hisMythologies (1957), frequently interrogated specific cultural materials in order to expose howbourgeois society asserted its values through them. For example, Barthes cited the portrayal of wine in French society. Its description as a robust and healthy habit is a bourgeois ideal that is contradicted by certain realities (i.e., that wine can be unhealthy and inebriating). He foundsemiotics, the study ofsigns, useful in these interrogations. He developed a theory of signs to demonstrate this perceived deception. He suggested that the construction of myths results in two levels of signification: the "language-object", a first order linguistic system; and the "metalanguage", the second-order system transmitting the myth.[12] The former pertains to the literal or explicit meaning of things while the latter is composed of the language used to speak about the first order.[12] Barthes explained that these bourgeois cultural myths were "second-order signs," or "connotations." A picture of a full, dark bottle is asignifier that relates to a specific "signified": a fermented, alcoholic beverage. However, the bourgeoisie relate it to a new signified: the idea of healthy, robust, relaxing experience. Motivations for such manipulations vary, from a desire to sell products to a simple desire to maintain thestatus quo. These insights brought Barthes in line with similar Marxist theory. Barthes used the term "myth" while analyzing the popular, consumer culture of post-war France in order to reveal that "objects were organized into meaningful relationships via narratives that expressed collective cultural values."[9]
Mythologies is a seminal work that consists of a collection of essays originally published as magazine articles, in which he examines elements ofFrench popular culture through the lens of semiotics. In this work, Barthes argues that cultural signs are not neutral but are deeply embedded in ideological structures that reinforce dominant social values. Drawing on concepts associated with WesternMarxist thought—such as ideology, authenticity, and commodity fetishism—Barthes decodes everyday phenomena like theCitroën car, professional wrestling, magazine covers, and children’s toys. For example, he interprets theCitroën as a modern cathedral symbolizing the fetishization of consumer goods, and a magazine cover featuring a Black soldier saluting theFrench flag as a subtle reinforcement of colonial ideology. Through such analyses, Barthes illustrates how ordinary cultural products function as tools of ideological reproduction in modern society.[13]
InThe Fashion System Barthes showed how this adulteration of signs could easily be translated into words. In this work he explained how in the fashion world any word could be loaded with idealistic bourgeois emphasis. Thus, if popular fashion says that a 'blouse' is ideal for a certain situation or ensemble, this idea is immediately naturalized and accepted as truth, even though the actual sign could just as easily be interchangeable with 'skirt', 'vest' or any number of combinations. In the end Barthes'sMythologies became absorbed into bourgeois culture, as he found third parties asking him to comment on a certain cultural phenomenon, being interested in his control over his readership. This turn of events caused him to question the overall utility of demystifying culture for the masses, thinking it might be a fruitless attempt, and drove him deeper in his search for individualistic meaning in art.
As Barthes's work withstructuralism began to flourish around the time of his debates with Picard, his investigation of structure focused on revealing the importance of language in writing, which he felt was overlooked by old criticism. Barthes's "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative"[14] is concerned with examining the correspondence between the structure of a sentence and that of a larger narrative, thus allowing narrative to be viewed alonglinguistic lines. Barthes split this work into three hierarchical levels: 'functions', 'actions' and 'narrative'. 'Functions' are the elementary pieces of a work, such as a single descriptive word that can be used to identify a character. That character would be an 'action', and consequently one of the elements that make up the narrative. Barthes was able to use these distinctions to evaluate how certain key 'functions' work in forming characters. For example, key words like 'dark', 'mysterious' and 'odd', when integrated together, formulate a specific kind of character or 'action'. By breaking down the work into such fundamental distinctions Barthes was able to judge the degree of realism given functions have in forming their actions and consequently with what authenticity a narrative can be said to reflect on reality. Thus, his structuralist theorizing became another exercise in his ongoing attempts to dissect and expose the misleading mechanisms ofbourgeois culture.
While Barthes found structuralism to be a useful tool and believed that discourse of literature could be formalized, he did not believe it could become a strict scientific endeavour. In the late 1960s, radical movements were taking place in literary criticism. Thepost-structuralist movement and thedeconstructionism ofJacques Derrida were testing the bounds of the structuralist theory that Barthes's work exemplified.Derrida identified the flaw of structuralism as its reliance on a transcendental signifier; a symbol of constant, universal meaning would be essential as an orienting point in such a closed off system. This is to say that without some regular standard of measurement, a system of criticism that references nothing outside of the actual work itself could never prove useful. But since there are no symbols of constant and universal significance, the entire premise of structuralism as a means of evaluating writing (or anything) is hollow.[citation needed]
Such thought led Barthes to consider the limitations not just of signs and symbols, but also of Western culture's dependency on beliefs of constancy and ultimate standards. He travelled toJapan in 1966 where he wroteEmpire of Signs (published in 1970), a meditation on Japanese culture's contentment in the absence of a search for a transcendental signifier. He notes that in Japan there is no emphasis on a great focus point by which to judge all other standards, describing the centre ofTokyo, theEmperor's Palace, as not a great overbearing entity, but a silent and nondescript presence, avoided and unconsidered. As such, Barthes reflects on the ability of signs in Japan to exist for their own merit, retaining only thesignificance naturally imbued by their signifiers. Such a society contrasts greatly to the one he dissected inMythologies, which was revealed to be always asserting a greater, more complex significance on top of the natural one.
In the wake of this trip Barthes wrote what is largely considered to be his best-known work, the essay "The Death of the Author" (1967). Barthes saw the notion of the author, or authorial authority, in the criticism of literary text as the forced projection of an ultimate meaning of the text. By imagining an ultimate intended meaning of a piece of literature one could infer an ultimate explanation for it. But Barthes points out that the great proliferation of meaning in language and the unknowable state of the author's mind makes any such ultimate realization impossible. As such, the whole notion of the 'knowable text' acts as little more than another delusion of Westernbourgeois culture. Indeed, the idea of giving a book or poem an ultimate end coincides with the notion of making it consumable, something that can be used up and replaced in a capitalist market. "The Death of the Author" is considered to be apost-structuralist work,[15] since it moves past the conventions of trying to quantify literature, but others see it as more of a transitional phase for Barthes in his continuing effort to find significance in culture outside of thebourgeois norms[citation needed]. Indeed, the notion of the author being irrelevant was already a factor of structuralist thinking.
Since Barthes contends that there can be no originating anchor of meaning in the possible intentions of the author, he considers what other sources of meaning or significance can be found in literature. He concludes that since meaning can't come from the author, it must be actively created by the reader through a process of textual analysis. In hisS/Z (1970), Barthes applies this notion in an analysis ofSarrasine, a Balzac novella. The result was a reading that establishedfive major codes for determining various kinds of significance, with numerous lexias throughout the text – a "lexia" here being defined as a unit of the text chosen arbitrarily (to remain methodologically unbiased as possible) for further analysis.[16] The codes led him to define the story as having a capacity for plurality of meaning, limited by its dependence upon strictly sequential elements (such as a definite timeline that has to be followed by the reader and thus restricts their freedom of analysis). From this project Barthes concludes that an ideal text is one that is reversible, or open to the greatest variety of independent interpretations and not restrictive in meaning. A text can be reversible by avoiding the restrictive devices thatSarrasine suffered from, such as strict timelines and exact definitions of events. He describes this as the difference between the writerly text, in which the reader is active in a creative process, and a readerly text in which they are restricted to just reading. The project helped Barthes identify what it was he sought in literature: an openness for interpretation.
In the late 1970s, Barthes was increasingly concerned with the conflict of two types of language: that of popular culture, which he saw as limiting and pigeonholing in its titles and descriptions, and neutral, which he saw as open and noncommittal.[17] He called these two conflicting modes theDoxa (the official and unacknowledged systems of meaning through which culture is absorbed)[18]) and thePara-doxa. While Barthes had sympathized with Marxist thought in the past (or at least parallel criticisms), he felt that, despite its anti-ideological stance, Marxist theory was just as guilty of using violent language with assertive meanings, as wasbourgeois literature. In this way they were both Doxa and both culturally assimilating. As a reaction to this, he wroteThe Pleasure of the Text (1975), a study that focused on a subject matter he felt was equally outside the realm of both conservative society and militant leftist thinking:hedonism. By writing about a subject that was rejected by both social extremes of thought, Barthes felt he could avoid the dangers of the limiting language of the Doxa. The theory he developed out of this focus claimed that, while reading for pleasure is a kind of social act, through which the reader exposes him/herself to the ideas of the writer, the finalcathartic climax of this pleasurable reading, which he termed the bliss in reading orjouissance, is a point in which one becomes lost within the text. This loss of self within the text or immersion in the text, signifies a final impact of reading that is experienced outside the social realm and free from the influence of culturally associative language and is thus neutral with regard to social progress.
Despite this newest theory of reading, Barthes remained concerned with the difficulty of achieving truly neutral writing, which required an avoidance of any labels that might carry an implied meaning or identity towards a given object. Even carefully crafted neutral writing could be taken in an assertive context through the incidental use of a word with a loaded social context. Barthes felt his past works, likeMythologies, had suffered from this. He became interested in finding the best method for creating neutral writing, and he decided to try to create a novelistic form of rhetoric that would not seek to impose its meaning on the reader. One product of this endeavor wasA Lover's Discourse: Fragments in 1977, in which he presents the fictionalized reflections of a lover seeking to identify and be identified by an anonymous amorous other. The unrequited lover's search for signs by which to show and receive love makes evident illusory myths involved in such a pursuit. The lover's attempts to assert himself into a false, ideal reality is involved in a delusion that exposes the contradictory logic inherent in such a search. Yet at the same time the novelistic character is a sympathetic one, and is thus open not just to criticism but also understanding from the reader. The result is one that challenges the reader's views of social constructs of love, without trying to assert any definitive theory of meaning.
Barthes also attempted to reinterpret themind–body dualism theory.[19] LikeFriedrich Nietzsche andEmmanuel Levinas, he also drew from Eastern philosophical traditions in his critique of European culture as "infected" by Western metaphysics. Hisbody theory emphasized the formation of the self through bodily cultivation.[19] The theory, which is also described as ethico-political entity, considers the idea of the body as one that functions as a "fashion word" that provides the illusion of a grounded discourse.[20] This theory has influenced the work of other thinkers such as Jerome Bel.[21]
Throughout his career, Barthes had an interest in photography and its potential to communicate actual events. A number of his monthly myth articles in the 1950s had attempted to show how a photographicimage could represent impliedmeanings and thus be used by bourgeois culture to infer 'naturalistic truths'. But he still considered the photograph to have a unique potential for presenting a completely real representation of the world. When his mother, Henriette Barthes, died in 1977 he began writingCamera Lucida as an attempt to explain the unique significance a picture of her as a child carried for him.
Reflecting on the relationship between the obvious symbolic meaning of a photograph (which he called the studium) and that which is purely personal and dependent on the individual, that which 'pierces the viewer' (which he called the punctum),[22] Barthes was troubled by the fact that such distinctions collapse when personal significance is communicated to others and can have its symbolic logic rationalized. Barthes found the solution to this fine line of personal meaning in the form of his mother's picture. Barthes explained that a picture creates a falseness in the illusion of 'what is', where 'what was' would be a more accurate description. As had been made physical through Henriette Barthes's death, her childhood photograph is evidence of 'what has ceased to be'. Instead of making reality solid, it serves as a reminder of the world's ever changing nature. Because of this there is something uniquely personal contained in the photograph of Barthes's mother that cannot be removed from his subjective state: the recurrent feeling of loss experienced whenever he looks at it. As one of his final works before his death,Camera Lucida was both an ongoing reflection on the complicated relations between subjectivity, meaning and cultural society as well as a touching dedication to his mother and description of the depth of his grief.
A posthumous collection of essays was published in 1987 byFrançois Wahl,Incidents.[23] It contains fragments from his journals: hisSoirées de Paris (a 1979 extract from his erotic diary of life in Paris); an earlier diary he kept which explicitly detailed his paying for sex with men and boys in Morocco; andLight of the Sud Ouest (his childhood memories of rural French life). In November 2007,Yale University Press published a new translation into English (by Richard Howard) of Barthes's little known workWhat is Sport. This work bears a considerable resemblance toMythologies and was originally commissioned by theCanadian Broadcasting Corporation as the text for a documentary film directed byHubert Aquin.
In February 2009,Éditions du Seuil publishedJournal de deuil (Journal of Mourning), based on Barthes's files written from 26 November 1977 (the day following his mother's death) up to 15 September 1979, intimate notes on his terrible loss:
The (awesome but not painful) idea that she had not been everything to me. Otherwise I would never have written a work. Since my taking care of her for six months long, she actually had become everything for me, and I totally forgot of ever have written anything at all. I was nothing more than hopelessly hers. Before that she had made herself transparent so that I could write.... Mixing-up of roles. For months long I had been her mother. I felt like I had lost a daughter.
He grieved his mother's death for the rest of his life: "Do not say mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not in mourning. I'm suffering." and "In the corner of my room where she had been bedridden, where she had died and where I now sleep, in the wall where her headboard had stood against I hung an icon—not out of faith. And I always put some flowers on a table. I do not wish to travel anymore so that I may stay here and prevent the flowers from withering away."
In 2012 the bookTravels in China was published. It consists of his notes from a three-week trip to China he undertook with a group from the literary journalTel Quel in 1974. The experience left him somewhat disappointed, as he found China "not at all exotic, not at all disorienting".[24]
Roland Barthes's criticism contributed to the development of theoretical schools such asstructuralism,semiotics, andpost-structuralism. While his influence is mainly found in these theoretical fields with which his work brought him into contact, it is also felt in every field concerned with the representation of information and models of communication, including computers, photography, music, and literature.[citation needed] One consequence of Barthes's breadth of focus is that his legacy includes no following of thinkers dedicated to modeling themselves after him. The fact that Barthes's work was ever adapting and refuting notions of stability and constancy means there is no canon of thought within his theory to model one's thoughts upon, and thus no "Barthesism".[citation needed]
Readerly andwriterly are terms Barthes employs both to delineate one type of literature from another and to implicitly interrogate ways of reading, like positive or negative habits the modern reader brings into one's experience with the text itself. These terms are most explicitly fleshed out inS/Z, while the essay "From Work to Text", fromImage—Music—Text (1977), provides an analogous parallel look at the active–passive and postmodern–modern ways of interacting with a text.
A text that makes no requirement of the reader to "write" or "produce" their own meanings. The reader may passively locate "ready-made" meaning. Barthes writes that these sorts of texts are "controlled by the principle of non-contradiction" (156), that is, they do not disturb the "common sense," or "Doxa," of the surrounding culture. The "readerly texts," moreover, "are products [that] make up the enormous mass of our literature" (5). Within this category, there is a spectrum of "replete literature," which comprises "any classic (readerly) texts" that work "like a cupboard where meanings are shelved, stacked, [and] safeguarded" (200).[25]
A text that aspires to the proper goal of literature and criticism: "... to make the reader no longer a consumer but a producer of the text" (4). Writerly texts and ways of reading constitute, in short, an active rather than passive way of interacting with a culture and its texts. A culture and its texts, Barthes writes, should never be accepted in their given forms and traditions. As opposed to the "readerly texts" as "product," the "writerly text is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system (Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages" (5). Thus reading becomes for Barthes "not a parasitical act, the reactive complement of a writing", but rather a "form of work" (10).
Author andscriptor are terms Barthes uses to describe different ways of thinking about the creators of texts. "The author" is the traditional concept of the lone genius creating a work of literature or other piece of writing by the powers of his/her original imagination. For Barthes, such a figure is no longer viable. The insights offered by an array of modern thought, including the insights ofSurrealism, have rendered the term obsolete. In place of the author, the modern world offers a figure Barthes calls the "scriptor," whose only power is to combine pre-existing texts in new ways. Barthes believes that all writing draws on previous texts, norms, and conventions, and that these are the things to which the reader must turn to understand a text. As a way of asserting the relative unimportance of the writer's biography compared to these textual and generic conventions, Barthes says that the scriptor has no past, but is born with the text. He also argues that, in the absence of the idea of an "author-God" to control the meaning of a work, interpretive horizons are opened up considerably for the active reader. As Barthes puts it, "the death of the author is the birth of the reader."[26]
In 1964, Barthes wrote "The Last Happy Writer" ("Le dernier des écrivains heureux" inEssais critiques), the title of which refers toVoltaire. In the essay he commented on the problems of the modern thinker after discovering the relativism in thought and philosophy, discrediting previous philosophers who avoided this difficulty. Disagreeing roundly with Barthes's description of Voltaire, Daniel Gordon, the translator and editor ofCandide (The Bedford Series in History and Culture), wrote that "never has one brilliant writer so thoroughly misunderstood another."[27]
The sinologistSimon Leys, in a review of Barthes's diary of a trip to China during theCultural Revolution, disparages Barthes for his seeming indifference to the situation of the Chinese people, and says that Barthes "has contrived—amazingly—to bestow an entirely new dignity upon the age-old activity, so long unjustly disparaged, of saying nothing at great length."[28]
Jeffrey Eugenides'The Marriage Plot draws out excerpts from Barthes'sA Lover's Discourse: Fragments as a way to depict the unique intricacies of love that one of the main characters, Madeleine Hanna, experiences throughout the novel.[29]
In the filmBirdman (2014) byAlejandro González Iñárritu, a journalist quotes to the protagonist Riggan Thompson an extract fromMythologies: "The cultural work done in the past by gods and epic sagas is now done by laundry-detergent commercials and comic-strip characters".[30]
In the filmThe Truth About Cats & Dogs (1996) byMichael Lehmann, Brian is reading an extract fromCamera Lucida over the phone to someone he thinks to be a beautiful woman but is actually her more intellectual and less physically desirable friend.[31]
Laurent Binet's novelThe 7th Function of Language is based on the premise that Barthes was not merely accidentally hit by a van driver but that he was instead murdered, as part of a conspiracy to acquire a document known as the "Seventh Function of Language".[33]
The Preparation of the Novel: Lecture Courses and Seminars at the Collège de France (1978–1979 and 1979–1980) (2011), Columbia University Press: New York.
How to Live Together: Notes for a Lecture Course and Seminar at the Collège de France (1976–1977) (2013), Columbia University Press: New York.
^Roland Barthes,"Introduction à l'analyse structurale des récits",Communications,8(1), 1966, pp. 1–27, translated as "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives", in: Roland Barthes,Image–Music–Text, essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath, New York 1977, pp. 79–124.
^Richard Howard. "Remembering Roland Barthes,"The Nation (20 November 1982): "Mutual friends brought us together in 1957. He came to my door in the summer of that year, disconcerted by his classes at Middlebury (teaching students unaccustomed to a visitor with no English to speak of) and bearing, by way of introduction, a fresh-printed copy ofMythologies. (Michelet andWriting Degree Zero had already been published in France, but he was not yet known in America—not even in most French departments. Middlebury was enterprising.)" Reprinted inSigns in Culture: Roland Barthes Today, edited by Steven Ungar and Betty R. McGraw, University of Iowa Press, 1989, p. 32 (ISBN0-877-45245-8).
^Natoli, Joseph P.; Hutcheon, Linda (1993).A Postmodern Reader. New York: SUNY Press. p. 299.ISBN0-7914-1638-0.
^abMiura, Noriko (2000).Marginal Voice, Marginal Body: The Treatment of the Human Body in the Works of Nakagami Kenji, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Salman Rushdie. Universal-Publishers. pp. 8, 13.ISBN978-1-58112-109-4.
^Mallon, Sean (2023).Tatau. Peter William Brunt, Nicholas Thomas, Mark Adams (Second ed.). Wellington, New Zealand: Te Papa Press. p. 61.ISBN978-1-9911509-8-1.OCLC1374847523.
^Manohla Dargis, "Extracurricular Lessons for Student and Teacher," review ofElegy, New York Times, 8 August 2008, accessed on 12-9-2015: Of the character of Consuela, Dargis writes, "She was his student and ripe for the plucking, especially in the film, where she enters clutching Roland Barthes's "Pleasure of the Text" to her lush bosom."
^Laurent, Binet (4 May 2017).The 7th function of language. Taylor, Sam, 1970–. London, England.ISBN9781910701591.OCLC956750580.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
^abMichael Wood (19 November 2009)."Presence of Mind".London Review of Books.31 (22).
Réda Bensmaïa,The Barthes Effect: The Essay as Reflective Text, trans. Pat Fedkiew, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Paul de Man, "Roland Barthes and the Limits of Structuralism", inRomanticism and Contemporary Criticism, ed. E.S. Burt, Kevin Newmark, and Andrzej Warminski, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
Jacques Derrida, "The Deaths of Roland Barthes," inPsyche: Inventions of the Other, Vol. 1, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth G. Rottenberg, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007.
D.A. Miller,Bringing Out Roland Barthes, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. (A highly personal collection of fragments, aimed at both mourning Barthes and illuminating his work in terms of a "gay writing position.")
Marie Gil,Roland Barthes: Au lieu de la vie, Paris: Flammarion, 2012. (The first major academic biography [562 p.])
Michael Moriarty,Roland Barthes, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991. (Explains various works of Roland Barthes)
Jean-Michel Rabate, ed.,Writing the Image After Roland Barthes, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.
Jean-Louis de Rambures, Interview with Roland Barthes in:Comment travaillent les écrivains, Paris: Flammarion, 1978
"Roland Barthes" "Comment vivre ensemble" ("How to live together"), Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977 and "Le Neutre" ("The Neutral"), Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978.
