Roland Barthes

From Geography

Roland Barthes (1915-80) was a critical cultural thinker, and a central figure in the study of language, literature, culture and the media, both as innovator and guide. His work has been influential in e.g. structuralism, semiology and poststructuralism (Allen, 2003). Barthes studied French literature and cultural studies in Paris. Later he became a professor in literature semiology at the prestegious College de France (Heijloo & Eskens, 2005). He was a post war cultural critic, obsessed by language. He investigated different ways of using language using the semiotics of Ferdinand de Saussure. He developed de Saussure's 'linguistic model' in a much wider field of signs and representations, such as in advertising, photography, architecture, design, fashion etc. (Hall, 1997). These semiotics seem to be a 'metalanguage', but in fact also are an interpretation of 'reality', or a form of giving meaning. Thereby he announced 'the dead of the author', because only through the reader a text could gain its meaning. One of his most famous works is 'Mythodologies' (1957).

Human Geography

In the field of Human Geography Barthes became used by Duncan and Duncan (1992). They used him as a way-station in their journey towards reading Landscape not as morphology but as text, out of literary theory that seeks to expose the enduring and underlying structures inscribed in the cultural practices of human subjects (Gregory, Johnston, Pratt, Watts, Whatmore, 2009)

References

Allen, G. (2003) Roland Barthes. Routledge, London

Gregory, D., Johnston, R., Pratt, G., Watts, M. and Whatmore, S. (2009) The dictionary of human geography, Wiley-Blackwell, Chicester

Hall, S. (1997) Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices. Sage publications, London

Heijloo, R., Eskens, E., (2005) Filosofen lexicon, Veen Magazines, Diemen

--AnneStrien 17:30, 2 October 2012 (CEST)