Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was a famous contemporary French philosopher and theorist of literature and art. He has made many theoretical achievements and great influences in many fields such as structuralism, post-structuralism, contemporary semiotics, linguistics, anthropology and so on.
1. Intertextuality
Criticize the stability of meaning or meaning relationships between words and sentences, sentences and sentences, and emphasize the instability of "between" or "relationships". In Roland-Barthes's view, this is what the word text really means.
2. The act of writing
Scholars face the text, referring to the study of the original work, its task is to determine the validity and correctness of the text, is it worth recognizing? Is it logical? How justified is it?
The term "work" refers to the raw material, and the work provides the possibilities, boundaries, and corresponding interpretations of the meaning contained in the text, which is how the text speaks, rather than a dead thing at its own peril. Thus, the word "text" means the act of writing.
In other words, Roland Barthes argues that the text is different from the work: the work refers to the original manuscript, while the text refers to two complementary aspects: first, when looking at the original work, it is necessary to think of how the author wrote it. Secondly, looking at the original work and rewriting the original work you read, forming a new part of the text. Barthes writes, "The book is in the hand, and the text is in the language." ”
3, textual analysis
In the 1960s and early 1970s, almost at the same time as Derrida, Roland Barthes also turned to post-structuralist thought. The so-called deconstruction of the original text, or the dissolution of the structure of the original text, seems to be a topological deformation of the original text, as if Picasso painted the beautiful woman in the classical oil painting into the abstract and obscure "unbeautiful" "Avignon Girl". If Picasso's painting in this way is also called "painting", then the deformation of classical philosophy like Roland Barthes and Derrida in this way or in one way is also called "philosophy".
Picasso was not a casual graffiti, as people who did not understand art think. The reason why Picasso became the founder of contemporary art is first of all that he understands classical painting too well, and can paint as well as classical oil painters, but he knows that the possibilities of classical oil painting in painting methods have been exhausted, which is the shortcoming of tradition, he is tired of this, and he takes inspiration from Cézanne, the father of modern art. The ideas of Roland Barthes and Derrida, also standing on the ruins of classical philosophy, drew inspiration from Saussure's linguistics.
In this sense, Roland Barthes (including Derrida) did not completely break with Saussure and his structuralist ideas, but, like Picasso, was only deformed, transmuted, and fickle. However, their ideas belong to modern and contemporary philosophy, just like Picasso's works, which belong to modern and contemporary art. Roland Barthes's most famous example of textual analysis is based on the reading of literary originals (Derrida is based on the reading of philosophical originals).
In analyzing literary texts, Roland Barthes no longer tries to trace back things outside the text (who wrote it?). Influenced by whom? What is the origin? What is the social background? He only considers the language itself, and the position of words and space is related to differences. In other words, he ignores history (or time). He looks for gaps and gaps in words in the text, such as sudden insertions, subtle word polysemy, and slipping away from the central idea. In short, he wanted to discover the contingency of the original author's mind, the fragmentary, unfinished passages, a sowing and grafting effect. "The road to coding is a fork in the road" – this is a quote from his short essay "The Death of the Author" in 1977.
4. Text theory
This is closely related to the "intertext" described above, because the connections between the words and sentences of the text provide a variety of meanings. The text is not a unified, isolated object, and a sentence does not have only one specific meaning. An element in a phrase can open up a variety of interpretations.
Similar to Kristeva (1941, professor of linguistics at the University of Paris VII), Roland Barthes believed that only literature written at this extraordinary moment of modernity could put the reader in a more proactive position in the text. Only modern literature is the model of "text". For modern texts, the reader is in a state of reinterpretation, rather than simply passively accepting the meaning given by the author. In short, in this way, the reader also becomes the author.
5. Reader type
In the process of generating and distinguishing the meaning of a text, Roland Barthes emphasized the role of the reader. Readers are roughly divided into two types: one is "consumer". Readers who are purely "consumers" read books only to get the meaning of "safe". Another type of reader is the "productive" reader. Such readers, in roland Barthes's words, can also be called "writers or even authors of texts." Obsessing over the second type of reader, in Roland Barthes's words, in contrast to traditional literary criticism, is doing "text analysis." This reading practice, which seems to be "rewriting", is the theoretical basis of Roland Barthes's "intertextivity" (also known as "intertextuality").
6, "The Death of the Author"
One of the most striking and widely spread sentences of "intertext" is what Roland Barthes called in his 7-page essay "The Death of the Author": "The birth of the reader must come at the expense of the death of the author." He declared the author dead.
Roland Barthes integrated psychoanalysis with linguistics. The source of a text is not a unified sense of authority, but from a variety of other words, statements, and texts.
7. Intertextual language
Roland Barthes pointed out that the meaning of the words used by the author did not come entirely from the author's own language, not entirely from the author's own language, not entirely from his own thoughts. The meaning of the words used by an author comes from their place within the linguistic (and cultural) system. The author's role is to encode, organize, and stitch together a meaning that does not yet exist within a language system.
Every word, sentence, paragraph, and even entire text that the author creates is "written" as in this photograph, and that's where they come from—produced from within a certain language system. Thus, the meaning of the text is expressed with the help of the same language system. Barthes's view of language expressed in this way is what theorists call "intertextuality."
8, meaning comes from language
For Roland Barthes, the meaning of "intertextuality," which means "nothing outside the text," destroys conceptualism. In other words, meaning or meaning does not come from ideas, but from language. The pronunciation of the text is not the private property of the author and cannot be exclusive to the author.
A modern writer, when he or she reads, is always in the dual process of reading and rewriting. It's like someone once simplified Derrida's writing: "I wrote the first sentence, but I shouldn't have written this sentence, forgive me, I'm going to erase everything and start from the beginning; I wrote the second sentence, but I thought about it and thought about it and felt that this sentence shouldn't be written either." ”
In short, the meaning of the text does not come only from the language of the author, but from the language of the interactive gaze.
9, the author becomes the reader
The intertextuality of writing makes traditional authors become readers. In The Death of the Author, Roland Barthes concludes: "An essay is woven from multiple articles, taken from multiple cultures, and involves dialogue relationships, comical imitation relationships, and argumentative relationships." The text is always in a position where gazes meet from multiple directions, in this position where the reader, not the author, is not any authority on thought. Reading is in such a space, in which everything is written is nothing more than a quotation dressed up in disguise... The birth of the reader must have come at the expense of the author's death. ”
10. Conceptualized "intertextuality"
Saussure, Bakhtin, Kristeva, Roland Barthes – they were all the founders of intertextuality, and they invented the concept of "intertextuality". But Roland Barthes's special contribution lies in the conscious use of "intertextuality" in the practice of writing, because he is not only a theoretician, but also a writer, and perhaps he has pioneered such a modern trend of thought: linguistics-literary criticism, and at the same time a literary and artistic work, such as his "Zero Degree of Writing" and "Lover's Whispers".