Roland Barthes (12 November 1915 – 25 March 1980) : was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes's work extended over many fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism and post-structuralism.
His famous essay ‘The Death of the Author’ is the ‘hinge’ round which Barthes turns from structuralism to post-structuralism. In that essay he announces the death of the author, which is a rhetorical way of asserting the independence of the literary text and its immunity to the possibility of being unified or limited by any notion of what the author might have intended, or ‘crafted’ into the work. Instead, the essay makes a declaration of radical textual independence: the work is not determined by intention, or context. Rather, the text is free by its very nature of all such restrains. Barthes says in this is essay that the corollary death of the author is the birth of the reader. This essay demonstrates a shift of attention from the text seen as a something produced by the author to the text seen as something produced by the reader, and, as it were, by language itself, for as Barthes also says, in the absence of an author, the claim to decipher a text becomes futile. Hence, this early phase of post-structuralism seems to license and revel in the endless free play of meanings and the escape from all forms of textual authority.
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Ironically enough, it seems that the only sensible way the put New Criticism, Structuralism and Formalism in perspective, noting similarities and identifying difference is by situating the schools in their historical and cultural context. The American New Critics champion close reading, formally isolating the text from intent and context, whereas the Russian Formalists, seeking literariness and using ostranenie anticipate the semiotics and signification of the French Structuralists. With every major scholar a distinct case, the complex genealogy of criticism may be broadly grouped geographically (as in the Prague or Yale school), the only simplification arises with figures that fall in two categories, like Jakobson.
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