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.”

In the following essay, Knight discusses Barthes's notion of Utopia as presented in several of his works, stressing that it “is a central—and highly conscious—preoccupation” for him.

The work of Roland Barthes is apparently highly varied, both in its object (literature, clothes, cinema, painting, advertising, music, news items, etc.) and in its method and ideology. Le Degré zéro de l'Écriture (1953) seemed to extend into the domain of "form" the reflection begun by Sartre some years earlier on the social situation of literature and the responsibility of the writer before history—a reflection on the frontiers of existentialism and Marxism....

In the following excerpt, originally published in French in 1990, Calvet examines works by Barthes published after his death and summarizes his intellectual and activist legacy.

Despite the refinements of modern means of communication, the relationship between Anglo-American and continental—especially French—literary criticism remains a star-crossed story, plagued by a variety of cultural gaps and time lags. The French have only just gotten around to translating an essay by Empson, and by the time American works of literary theory or literary criticism appear in Paris they often have lost much of their youthful freshness. There is more good will and curiosity in the o...

In the following essay, Saint-Amand discusses the concept of laziness as it applies to Barthes and several of his writings, noting that for Barthes it remained a form of desire that never became a reality.

If a consistent theory of criticism emerges in [the] discontinuity of perspectives offered by Barthes … throughout his career, it very probably depends on what might be coined a zero-degree hermeneutics comparable to the concept of zero-degree style which he originally proposed almost three decades ago. As he advocates for literary form, his critical theory seems to be suspended in interspace between the methodologies which dominate it, but without really bringing these into harmony with each other. ...

Roland Barthes is an incomparable enlivener of the literary mind. He is as adventurous in the formulation of new principles for the understanding of literature as he is provocative in dispatching the old ones. To read him is to be led to think more intelligently and enjoyably about what literature is; about both the practice of writing and its function. He has renewed literary criticism in France, which is now a far more varied and practical discipline than it was, and is helping to renew it outside France ...

In a single day, how many really non-signifying fields do we cross? Very few, sometimes none. Here I am before the sea; it is true that it bears no message. But on the beach, what material for semiology! Pennants, slogans, signals, signboards, clothes, suntan even, which are so many messages to me.                          ...

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.

A personal relationship linked me with Roland Barthes while he was alive, and it did not end with his death. I cannot claim even the illusion of impartiality if I am to speak of him. Not only will I be irresistibly tempted to suppress anything in him that does not suit me and to valorize the ways in which he is close to me, but I cannot find in myself the necessary strengths that would allow me to see him as a closed entity capable of being completely circumscribed, an object, as Genet had become for Sartre...

The written trace of a seminar held in the years 1968 and 1969, S/Z is the text which focuses, for me, the strengths and weaknesses of that period in an intellectual form. It is Barthes's choice of a story to analyse which determines Balzac's place in the title of this paper ["Realism: Balzac and Barthes"] but it would be a mistake to think that Barthes's choice was aleatory. If the immediate occasion for the selection of Balzac's story Sarrasine was an article by J...

When I first ran through [Roland Barthes'] commentaries on [Racine's] tragedies, published on the occasion of a new edition of Racine, I did not take them very seriously. Somewhat baffled, and more scandalized than amused, I supposed them to be a piece of hackwork in the performance of which the writer had diverted himself, with his usual talent, by entering the realm of the venturesome and the preposterous. But when in 1963 these studies were collected in a volume with other writings [On Raci...

In the following essay, Taylor presents an overview of Barthes's works, concluding that they remain fascinating objects of study because they reveal his inner turmoil as well as his complex critical thinking.

Roland Barthes was sixty-four when he died last week 26 March 1980, but the career was younger than that age suggests, for he was thirty-seven when he published his first book. After the tardy start there were many books, many subjects. One felt that he could generate ideas about anything. Put him in front of a cigar box and he would have one, two, many ideas—a little essay. It was not a question of knowledge (he couldn't have known much about some of the subjects he wrote about) but of alertn...

In Barthes's view, we are perpetually caught up, at every moment of our experience, by a mesh of words that prevents us from seeing what is really happening…. [We] perpetually see life in terms of the books we have read, and have quite lost the ability to see physical objects as they actually are. In so far as it ties us down to a predigested version of the way somebody else first saw the world and expressed it for us, this habit prevents us from realising our full potential as free human bein...

These are still the Banquet Years in France, though not everyone will savor the feast of books and essays produced there since 1945. One might have thought that Jean-Paul Sartre, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Maurice Merleau-Ponty had exhausted a certain vein. Philosophy and literature invaded each other's realm; science mingled with cultural criticism. Yet Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and others are still taking on linguistics, semiotics, structuralism, sociology and psychoanaly...

To say [Barthes] is one of the new French "structuralists" is no help: it is only misleading. What is "structuralism" any-way? We shall later see whether such a "school of philosophy" exists at all. Meanwhile, Barthes can be localized as a French critic and indeed as one of the most articulate and important literary critics writing today in any language, although Writing Degree Zero might not be enough, by itself, to convince anyone of the fact. This is an extremely...

Writing Degree Zero probably isn't the easiest text with which to start an acquaintance with Barthes. The book is compact to the point of ellipsis, often arcane. It barely suggests the variety and intellectual mobility of Barthes' subsequent work…. Though explicitly theoretical in character, the argument here can't compare in rigor or completeness with Barthes' later development of some of these ideas in his "Eléments de Sémiologie."… Mor...

Literary theory has not yet found its place in literary history. Many Anglo-Americans are skeptical about its place in literary transactions because literary theory sometimes places actual readers and spectators of literary events in the background. The solution may not lie in integrating literary theory into literary history…. [The] writings of Roland Barthes encourage the beginnings of … a case for theory which encompasses both literary and historical texts. Barthes especially encourages exp...

Two writers, Nietzsche and Gide, both of whom played a decisive role in Barthes's intellectual formation, once compared their mode of thinking as analogous to a 'dance'. The analogy could be aptly applied to Barthes's own work, not in the sense of a carefully choreographed execution, but rather as an experimental performance, forever changing positions, ceaselessly self-revising, above all always on the move…. [In] the simplest terms, what was Barthes—a literary cri...

Roland Barthes is a sort of serious joke. It first appeared in a series called x par lui-même—for example, Michelet by Himself, to name the volume for which Barthes happens to have been responsible. So to ask a writer to do his own "par lui-même" was part compliment, part gag, and Barthes followed up by reviewing the book himself in the Quinzaine litteraire, under the heading "'Barthes by Barthes' by Barthes." But the joke is serious because the...

Roland Barthes is one of the very few literary critics in any language of whom it can be said that he has never written a bad or uninteresting page…. Barthes is neither an academic critic, nor a reviewer, but strictly an occasional writer: he produces writing for prefaces, commemoratives, conferences, events, seminars, commissions from publishers, captions for pictures, descriptions of striking objects. Although his Critical Essays and Mythologies collect relatively early work—roughly from 195...

Histrionics and rhetoric give Barthes' essays a look of originality that they do not always possess. They capture attention by their emphatic style but often add little to what literary historians have already said in studies that maintain better balance and are more wary of specious generalizations. This is already evident in his first work, Le Degré Zéro de l'Ecriture, a dazzling piece of argumentation in which he attempts to isolate from language and style a distinct socio-his...

Although Le Degré zéro de l'écriture (Zero Degree of Writing) is presented by its author, Roland Barthes, as a working hypothesis, it has a dogmatic tone. (p. 185) According to Roland Barthes, "writing is in no way a means of communication." As the opposite of spoken language, it is by nature a counter-communication. Its particular ambiguity is in that it is at the same time language and coercion. Since all paradoxes, however laden with truth they may be, are capabl...

[Barthes] has powerful opponents at home, but I doubt whether there will be much raising of voices here, and the reason is not simply that we are insular. Although Barthes is famous for recondite meditations on the sign-structures not only of literature but of what you never thought had sign-structures, like menus, fashions and furniture, so qualifying as an adventurous structuralist, he rarely refers to any language except French, or to any literature except French. Thus in Writing Degree Zero there is a f...