The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Consumption and Consumer Studies

Barthes, Roland

MING LIM

University of Leicester, UK

DOI: 10.1002/9781118989463.wbeccs017

Roland Barthes (1915–80) is a familiar name to readers of cultural and literary theory, but he remains, for many, a somewhat enigmatic figure. As a cultural critic and a semiologist, his method of analysis can appear, as the translator of the 1957 edition of Mythologies, Annette Lavers, puts it, “highly poetic and idiosyncratic.” This entry aims to clarify his early work, specifically his arguments relating to myth and the uses of semiology in cultural analysis.

Barthes was born in Cherbourg, France and enjoyed a distinguished career in French academia: in his mid-30s and 40s, he held positions at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and eventually, at 61, took up the Chair in Literary Semiology at the Collège de France. Barthes was trained in linguistics, philosophy and psychoanalysis, and his work exercised formidable influence across the Anglophone world throughout much of the 1980s and 1990s and has earned an enduring place in the history of thought, particularly in departments of literary theory, comparative literature, media, and culture.

Barthes argued that the books and films we read and watch, the foods we eat, the entertainment we indulge in, and the advertising we consume were often uncritically accepted as natural and unmysterious. He wanted to debunk what he called the “essential enemy” (1972/1957, 9) or the “bourgeois norm” of this kind of attitude toward cultural ...