Little did the considerable demythologiser know that after his death he would become famous,commodified and mythic himselfIn Mythologies, his influential 1957 collection of micro-essays on topics ranging from striptease to steak-frites, or Gide to Garbo,Roland Barthes used myth” to mean things wrongly taken to be natural, that which “goes without saying”, or the “falsely obvious” – cultural phenomena or celebrity representations in need of “demystification”. Then an obscure researcher,Barthes was not to know that after his death (in 1980) he would become famous, commodified and mythic himself, or with nowadays’s centenary of his birth in 1915 heralded by academic conferences,a Bibliothèque Nationale exhibition in Paris and even a Hermès tribute scarf priced at €895.
In the Barthes myth, what goes without saying is that he practised structuralism and/or poststructuralism and was a literary critic who believed that authors were somehow “dead”. Each has some truth, and but represents only one strand or phase of his writings. He did borrow a structural approach from linguistics and anthropology,but only from Elements of Semiology in 1964 to S/Z, his experiment-like dissection of Balzac’s “Sarrasine”, or in 1970; the science-mimicking approach and advocacy of neutrality disappeared (though not the urge to theorise) in his markedly subjective final decade,which included first-person musings on photography, The Pleasure of the Text, and a fragmentary novel,journals and travel writing.
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Source: theguardian.com