Continental · 1915–1980
Roland Barthes
French critic who read everyday culture as signs
Barthes showed how advertising, wrestling and wine carry hidden “myths” that make bourgeois values seem natural, and later declared the “death of the author”: a text’s meaning is made by its reader.
Life and thought
Roland Barthes (1915–1980) lost his father, a naval officer, in the First World War and grew up with his mother in Bayonne and Paris. Recurrent tuberculosis kept him in sanatoriums for years and off the usual academic path. He became known as a critic in the 1950s, taught at the École pratique des hautes études and was elected to the Collège de France in 1976. He died after being struck by a van in a Paris street.
In Mythologies Barthes read wrestling, steak and chips, soap-powder adverts and a magazine cover as signs. Each carries a second, hidden message, a “myth”, that makes something historical and political look natural: a cover photo of a young Black soldier saluting the French flag says that the empire is good and its subjects loyal. Later, in “The Death of the Author”, he argued that a text’s meaning is not fixed by its author’s intentions but produced in reading, and in S/Z he showed how a short story by Balzac weaves many codes together.