Outline and evaluate Barthes concept of myth - Essay Example

Barthes was brought up in Bayonne by the mother and, periodically, by his grandparents. Barthes attended the Lycée Montaigne, Paris (1924-30), and Lycée Louis-le-Grand (1930-34). At the Sorbonne he studied classical letters, Greek tragedy, grammar and philology, receiving degrees in classical letters (1939) and grammar and philology (1943). In 1934 Barthes contracted tuberculosis and he spent the years 1934-35 and 1942-46 in sanatoriums. Numerous relapses with tuberculosis prevented him from carrying out his doctoral research.

He taught in Rumania and in Egypt, where he met A. J. Greimas, then at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. He was one of the founding figures in the theoretical movement centered on the journal Tel Quel. As the leading structuralist thinker, Barthes was highly influenced by Ferdinand de Saussures semiology - the formal study of signs and signification. He was a prolific interpreter, disseminator, and reviser of most of the complex theoretical concepts that circulated within Frances centers of learning from the 1950s on.

Barthes was appointed to the Collège de France in 1977 and was acknowledged as the leading critic of his generation in 1978. Aside from being the dominant theorist of the 1970s across Europe and America, Barthes made his influence felt in popular culture as well. He dies Mars 26 1980, due to complications after hed been hit by a van on his way home from a lunch with François Mitterand in February the same year. Barthes is particularly interested, not so much in what things mean, but in how things mean.

One of the reasons Barthes is a famous and well-known intellectual figure is his skill in finding, manipulating and exploiting theories and concepts of how things come to mean well before anyone else. As an intellectual, Barthes is associated with a number of intellectual trends (e.g. structuralism and post-structuralism) in postwar