Biography of Roland Barthes

The language and its symbols

12 November 1915 26 March 1980 Between the leaders of the new French criticism of structuralist orientation, linguist, essayist and literary critic Roland Barthes was born in Cherbourg on November 12, 1915. In 1916 his father Louis, Lieutenant, dies in a battle in the North Sea; his mother Henriette Binger moved to Bayonne. Here the young Roland will spend his childhood. In 1924 and until 1930 he moved to Paris where he attended middle school at the ecole Montaigne; He spent school vacations in Bayonne at the grandparents ' House. Over the next four years he attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand to address philosophical. After convalescence following a strong attack of haemoptysis, caused by an injury to the left lung, in 1935 he enrolled in the Sorbonne at the Faculty of Classics. During this period he founded the Group of ancient theatre. Gets the exemption from military service (1937) and during the summer he went to Debreczen, Hungary, with the assignment to the reader. With the antique theatre group travels in Greece; He graduated with the highest grades (1939) and immediately was hired at the new high school of Biarritz as lecturer where; you will stay for a year. The following year (1940-1941) works as a teacher and a special education teacher in high schools Voltaire and Carnot in Paris; Meanwhile, won't stop further study and received an additional diploma course on Greek tragedy. In October 1941 he relapsed pulmonary tuberculosis; He spent the first year of convalescence in Saint-Hilaire-du-Tourvet, at the sanatorium for students. Then he goes to the Post-Cure in Paris; During this period focuses on studies and obtained a second degree in Grammar and Philology. A further problem in the right lung forced him to return to the sanatorium for students; Here he studied psychiatric medicine. They exacerbate health problems even when he travels to Lesyn, Alexandre clinic (employed by the Swiss University Sanatorium), but no use because in October 1945 was hit again. From 1946 to 1947 he was in Paris in convalescence: in 1948 initially appointed Assistant librarian accepts and later by French Professor and lecturer at the University of the capital. In 1949 is lecturer at the University of Alexandria in Egypt where he remained until 1950. Researcher at CNRS (Lexicology) from 1952 to 1954, before then from 1955 to 1959. Meanwhile it also performs literary consultant at the Èditions de l'arche. He became head of research at the 6th section of the Ecole pratique des Hautes Ètudes, economics and social sciences and Director of studies until 1962. In 1976 accepted the Chair of literary Semiology at the Collège de France and collaborates in numerous periodicals including the Esprit and Tel Quel. Meanwhile Barthes writes and publishes numerous critical essays about classical and contemporary writers, pointing the way you talked about its most important feature. Great commitment gives the study of existing relations between myths and fetishes of contemporary reality and social institutions; Barthes studies report of clash between the language-understood as collective heritage-and the individual language. Develops over time a semiological theory that takes into account the large units of meaning: the policy that Barthes has goes beyond the academic thesis-philological acting as a continuous and urges the question text. Despite poor health got him all his life, Roland Barthes dies on March 26, 1980 due to a car accident (on 25 February, leaving the Collège de France, was hit by a minivan).
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