Roland Barthes: A biography [Hardcover]

Louis Jean Calvet (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1995

This is a biography of Roland Barthes - one of the most important European intellectuals of the post-war years. In a lively account of Barthes's life and work, Calvet follows the brilliant semiotician from his provincial origins to his sudden death in 1980. He describes Barthes's move to Paris as a child, where he lived with his mother in modest surroundings and constant hardship. He argues that the experience of having his academic prospects ruined by his illness at an early age remained a thorn in Barthes's flesh: until the end of his life his relationship with the academic world was never free of bitterness, even resentment. Calvet retraces his years in Paris, Bucharest and Alexandria after the war. During this period Barthes gained access to intellectual circles and experienced his decisive encounter with modern linguistics, particularly with "semiotics", which he helped to establish as a discipline through his work on everyday myths, fashion and literature. Calvet discusses the whole range of Barthes's work as a critic and literary theorist, and demonstrates his tremendous importance and influence in the second half of the 20th century. This book provides a detailed portrait of Barthes's life, and a vivid reconstruction of the intellectual culture of post-war France. It should be of interest to students and researchers in literature, cultural studies, French studies, and anyone interested in the life and work of Roland Barthes.

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Succinct, accessible and witty, this is the first biography of one of the postwar era's most prominent literary theorists (1915-1980). His academic promise initially thwarted by self-doubt and sustained bouts with tuberculosis, Barthes, as much as his contemporaries Foucault and Lacan, has had a formidable influence on the academy. In Writing Degree Zero and S/Z, he drew upon semiotics to revolutionize literary criticism of the novel; his Mythologies, a formative influence on cultural studies, brought scholarly scrutiny to bear on fashion, wrestling and other areas of popular culture. Though Barthes was self-effacing, discreet (a friend of 33 years learned only after Barthes's death that the theorist was gay) and skeptical of biography's ability to lay its subject bare, Sorbonne linguistics professor Calvet deftly sketches a unified portrait of the man and his work.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

As presented by Calvet, a teacher of sociolinguistics in Paris, Barthes's life is as engrossing as a novel and contains as many undeveloped byways as his critical corpus. Of course, it will be valuable for students of Structuralism, since it will verify the origins of Barthes's semiotics, which included his own reading of his life for signs. However, Calvet's narrative of the undecodable, i.e., unexplained and undocumentable, mysteries, will make the work enjoyable to readers generally: the anomalies of Barthes's impoverished childhood; the distress of his seven-year bout with tuberculosis; the expatriate isolation of posts in Egypt, Morocco, and Romania; his friendship with Greimas, who taught him Saussurian linguistics; and, above all, his carefully concealed, ardent homosexuality. This biography should send U.S. readers back to Barthes's work. For both general and advanced readers.
Marilyn Gaddis Rose, Binghamton Univ.,
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 291 pages
• Publisher: Indiana University Press; First Edition edition (1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0253349877
• ISBN-13: 978-0253349873
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #188,985 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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