Roland Barthes


 * Roland Barthes
 * 1915-1980
 * “French critic and man of letters” (Richter 868)
 * Deconstruction
 * Structuralist approach: “though language may not be everything, practically everything we do that is specifically human is expressed in language”
 * Derrida (Deconstruction) — “his notion that all thought is necessarily inscribed in language, and that language itself is fraught with intractable paradoxes. We can repress or ignore these paradoxes, but we cannot escape from them or solve them.”
 * Barthes shifted from the structuralist approach to the school of deconstruction.
 * “Barthes’s interest, since his 1953 essay ‘Writing Degree Zero,’ has been in the  immense tacit knowledge the reader possess, over and above the syntax and basic semantics of a given language, to understand and interpret cultural systems of symbols.” (832)
 * “The Death of an Author”
 * “… for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity if the body of writing.” (875)
 * “As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself, this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins.”
 * “From Work to Text”
 * “… an account of the difference in the way of object of literary study is perceived by formal and structural criticism on the one hand, and by poststructural criticism on the other.”
 * “… Barthes contrasts the emotional involvement of the reader before and after the deconstructive turn. The older, passive way of reading produced plaisir (pleasure), the consumer’s enjoyment in being immersed in another’s vision, actions, characters. The new way produces what Barthes terms jouissance [bliss] that suggests both the joy and sense of loss experienced in the sexual climax.