Roland Barthes had lived with his mother for much of his life. After her death in 1977 he reflected, From now on I could do no more than await my total, undialectical death
(cited in Allen, 2003, 134). In March of 1980 he was struck by a laundry truck, and died after a month in hospital.
Barthes's thought is inter-related with the arguments of other post-structuralists. Later in his career Barthes sought to define langue and parole as discrete but intermingled entities. The interplay of the contradictory elements happens between writer and history, text and audience, or the structured and the abrupt widens the horizon of meaning.
Barthes is enigmatic in that both the focus of his work and writing style are hard to concretely define. He lived in the plural
(Derrida, 1981, in D. Knight, (ed.), p. 132) As
Todorov (1981) commented, No one would ever again think of Barthes as a semiologist, a sociologist, a linguist, even though he might have lent his voice to each of those figures in
succession; nor would they think of him as philosopher or a 'theorist'
(in D. Knight (ed.) p. 125). Barthes nonetheless was a semiologist, sociologist, linguist and a theorist.
Barthes is important to the field of Critical Communication in that he applied a semiological approach to media culture. His thought can also be regarded as a foundation for empirical research about the relationship between messages and audiences, in that he argued for the plurality of the message meaning produced through the interwork of structure and agency.
- 1204 reads
