Roland Barthes

From Wikipedia:

Roland Gérard Barthes  was a French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher critic, and semiotician. His work engaged in the analysis of a variety of sign systems, mainly derived from Western popular culture. His ideas explored a diverse range of fields and influenced the development of multiple schools of theory, including structuralism, anthropology, literary theory, and post-structuralism.

Barthes is a sort-of-recent discovery for me. I have Barthes's Mythologies on my bookshelf, but I'd read only a few of its essays, and even those few seemed dense and intimidating.

A few months ago, however, I came across the delightful Barthes Studies account on Bluesky (sign-in required; the account is by the editor of the Barthes Studies journal), and was struck by Barthes's playfulness and humility. And then I discovered this beautiful post, simultaneously a brief vignette about Barthes's grief over his dead mother and Lydia Davis's rendering of it as a (very) short story.

The grief was recounted in his Mourning Diary; I borrowed it from the library, read it hungrily while on vacation in New York--in cafes, on the subway, sitting at a bar in restaurants--and was smitten.

Backlinks

The following pages link to this page:

• Lecture in Inauguration of the Chair of Literary Semiology, College de France
• Mourning Diary
• The Man Who Was Recklessly Curious