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Roland Barthes Analysis

2007 Words9 Pages
1. Roland Barthes and His Poststructuralist Views
Roland Barthes (1915-80) is considered one of the prominent French literary critics who is an emblem of the turning point from structuralism to poststructuralist. Jonathan Culler calls Barthes “famous for contradictory reasons.” (Cain, E.,1316)
Because he was first interested in exploring the scientific and structural points of Saussure and his semiology as well as his notion of codifying the universe and narratives.On the other hand, Barthes attempted to explore the pleasure of the texts which is one of the major concerns of the poststructuralists.
In his revolutionary work “The Death of the Author” he takes the story of Sarrasine by Balzac, the tale of a sculptor who falls in love with a woman who is indeed a castrato. By analyzing this text Barthes declared the death of author as Nietzsche previously had declared the death of God. Barthes believed that the text and the author are composed of infinite quotations and that they are deprived of any origin. The author himself/herself is a text like a character of some novel and he/she is no longer considered the creator of some literary text.
This paper tries to explore these poststructuralist notions in A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man and Stephan Dedalus. It also tries to introduce itself as a text full of gaps and fissures.

2. Barthes, juissance, work, text
Barthes in his essay “The Death of the Author” says that in his storySarrasine, Balzac, speaking of a castrato
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