In 1976 Roland Barthes was appointed chair of literary semiology and elected to the Collège de France--the highest position in the French academic system. His lifelong pursuit of formally interpreting the sign systems that make up culture from...

Barthes, Roland(1915 placement: Lecture de Barthes. Paris: Fayard, 1974. Lavers, Annette. Roland Barthes: Structuralism and After. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. Miller, D. A. Bringing Out Roland Barthes. Berkeley: University of...

Biosemiotics · Code Computational semiotics Connotation · Decode · Denotation Encode · Lexical · Modality Salience · Sign · Sign relation Sign relational complex · Semiosis Semiosphere · Literary...

In an introductory note, Louis-Jean Calvet advises us that his biography of Roland Barthes has been twice censored. In the one case, the "wishes" of Barthes' heirs prevented Calvet from quoting unpublished Barthes texts, notably correspondence, so that, as the author laments, his...

Roland Barthes' complaint against the use of language is principally aimed at two of its levels, namely, communication and symbolism. The criticism is based on the alienation between the Self and external reality that becomes a consequence of usage of language in these levels....

Charles Mee, one of the village elders of the New York avant-garde scene, is being honored by the Signature Theatre Company with his own season, a richly deserved accolade. The 68-year-old innovator joins an elite group of major American artists—like Edward Albee, Adrienne Kennedy, John...

Question: What’s an hour and a half long (without intermission), driven by Concept and set to Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons? Answer: Either of two ballets that have just had their Paris premieres. Nicolas Le Riche’s Caligula, in fact, has just had its world premiere—though I...

In the following essay, originally published in 1994, Chambers comments on Barthes's treatment of his homosexuality in Incidents and Soirées de Paris in the context of postcolonialism and historical consciousness.

When the Author died in France in 1968, it was Roland Barthes who with his essay "La mort de l'auteur" administered the coup de grâce. Jacques Derrida had already warned, in Of Grammatology, of the frivolity of thinking that "'Descartes,' 'Leibniz,' 'Rousseau,' 'Hegel,' are names of authors," since they indicated "neither identities nor causes," but rather "the name of a problem." Mi...

In the following essay, Porter analyzes Barthes's The Empire of Signs, suggesting that in writing the book Barthes consciously tried to go beyond “Orientalism” as a travel writer, and that Japan appealed to him as a “place where knowledge is uncoupled from power.”