Roland Barthes

French critic and semiologist (1915-1980), one of the main representatives of structural linguistics and contemporary semiotics. His body of work is large; early on he revamped his approach to the analysis of literary texts in Le Degré zéro de l'écriture (1953). Later in his book entitled Mythologiques (1957), which won him a large audience, he tried to make readers aware of the fact that myths (signs par excellence) create beliefs and serve as ideological tools. Apart from other works on the foundations of semiology, following the pioneers Saussure and Greimas, he published Fragments d'un discours amoureux (1977) and La chambre claire. Note sur la photographie (1980). The latter is an unusually delicate analysis of the art of photography, which “says nothing (necessarily) that is no more, but only says with sureness what has been.”