ABSTRACT
Roland Barthes (1915-80) was a French literary critic and cultural theorist. Born in Cherbourg, France, he studied French and classics at the Sorbonne in Paris. He was active in protests against fascism and wrote for leftist journals and magazines. During World War II he taught in Paris, having been exempted from military service because of tuberculosis. After the war he taught in Romania, but later returned to school at the University of Alexandria where he studied linguistics with A.J. Greimas. He returned to Paris in the 1950s and worked at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) as a lexicographer and later as a sociologist. During this time, he wrote theatre criticism for Théâtre populaire and emerged as a strong advocate of the German leftist playwright Bertolt Brecht and an equally strong critic of what he considered the bourgeois tendencies of contemporary French theatre. He stopped writing on theatre by the end of the 1950s. From 1960 until his death he taught at the École practique des hautes études. In 1976 he was elected to a chair in literary semiology at the Collège de France. Along with several others discussed in this book, he was a member of the 1960s group organized around the literary journal Tel Quel. Barthes died in 1980 from injuries suffered when he was struck by a van while walking in Paris.
