SOURCE: Metzidakis, Stamos. “Barthes's Image.”¹ Neophilologus 71, no. 4 (October 1987): 489-95.

In the following essay, Metzidakis traces a change in Barthes's use of the term “image” in his writings, asserting that it corresponds to a change of attitude in his critical thinking.

Roland Barthes did more to change the way literature is read and taught than perhaps any other French critic of the last thirty years. Having begun his career with the simple desire to write, he passed through successive phases of aesthetic and intellectual evolution during which he was—to borrow his terms—a social mythologist, semiologist, textual critic, and finally, moralist.² Barthes has thus come to be regarded by many as something of a protean figure of modern critical thought. However, the images we have of him are so elusive that, often, we know neither what to call him, nor what to call the activities he performed at...