Roland Barthes

is one of a handful of writers who can be said to have established the foundations for modern literary and cultural theory

Roland Barthes is a crucial figure in modern literary and cultural theory. His work has been influential in a wide variety of theoretical trends and practices, including structuralism, semiology , post-structuralism, cultural studies and psychoanalytical literary criticism. Barthes is one of a handful of writers who can be said to have established the foundations for modern literary and cultural theory . T o understand theory today one must come to know about and engage with his work.

is a theorist who, whenever he senses that an approach, or set of ideas, has become stable, generally accepted, assimilated into a professional, institutional practice, he moves his discourse and his practice somewhere else.

Barthes’s practice as a writer of theoretical texts constantly changes and mutates; whenever, as a theorist, Barthes senses that an approach, or set of ideas, has become stable, generally accepted, assimilated into a professional, institutional practice, he moves his discourse and his practice somewhere else. He does this because, for him, as for most of the founders of modern theory, the discursive practice of theory must be one which challenges received ideas and questions the orthodoxies which inevitably dominate any language. If one of theory’s fundamental purposes is to remind us of the arbitrary, culturally specific nature of all language use, then theory must attack languages which present themselves as stable, universally valid and timeless.

is positioned historically at the rear-guard of the avant-garde: to be avant-garde one must know what is dead; to be rear-guard, one must still love it.

In the 1971 Tel Quel interview cited in the last chapter (p. 15), Barthes figures the position he has adopted as a critic in very personal terms (involving a love of certain forms of writing), but his main point is to affirm his position between cultural and historical trends: ‘my own historical position . . . is to be at the rear-guard of the avant-garde: to be avant-garde one must know what is dead; to be rear-guard, one must still love it . . . this is, I think, the exact place of what I write’ (Res: 263). p.26

Roland Barthes, n.Memes

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