Roland Barthes

French philosopher and essayist

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Lived 1915–1980, aged 65France

France AcademicsAcademic

Wikipedia
67 languages
Cross-language footprint
Era
1915–1980
Aged 65
Known for
The Bronte Sisters
1979

Summary

Updated 2026-06-08

He argued the author was dead — that once a text exists, the writer's intent doesn't matter, only what the reader makes of it. The claim rattled literary criticism and made Roland Barthes the most quoted theorist in undergrad seminars for half a century.

Biography

About

Born in 1915, Barthes spent his career reading the world as a system of signs: not just novels and poems, but wrestling matches, soap commercials, the iconography of steak-frites. His 1957 Mythologies dissected the myths embedded in French popular culture, treating them with the same seriousness as high literature. A decade later, "The Death of the Author" became his most famous provocation, dismantling the idea that a writer's biography or intention should govern how we interpret a text. He taught at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and later the Collège de France, moving thro…

Voice

In their own words

Sourced, dated quotes from Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes

said1977

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

— "Talking," in A Lover's Discourse (1977)

Roland Barthes

said1975

The politician being interviewed clearly takes a great deal of trouble to imagine an ending to his sentence: and if he stopped short? His entire policy would be jeopardized!

— "Sentence," in The Pleasure of the Text (1975)

Roland Barthes

said1957

The bourgeoisie is defined as the social class which does not want to be named.

— p. 138

Roland Barthes

said1957

Bourgeois norms are experienced as the evident laws of a natural order—the further the bourgeois class propagates its representations, the more naturalized they become.

— p. 140

Roland Barthes

said1957