Among distinguished sociologists, Roland Barthes is associated with French structuralism and post-structuralism. Roland Barthes's approach to literature combines sociology, literary criticism, semiology, structural anthropology and Marxism. Roland Barthes has made immense contributions to the analysis of culture, texts and ideology. Roland Barthes used the term "myth" while analyzing the popular culture and consumer culture of post-war France in order to show that "objects were organized into meaningful relationships via narratives that expressed collective cultural values."
Roland Barthes said "There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it." In The Fashion System Roland Barthes showed how this adulteration of signs could easily be translated into words. In this work he explained how in the fashion world any word could be loaded with idealistic bourgeois emphasis. If popular fashion culture says that a ‘blouse’ is ideal for a certain situation, this idea is immediately naturalized and accepted as truth, though the actual sign could easily be interchangeable with any number of combinations.
Roland Barthes's works include: Sade/Fourier/Loyola (1971), Mythologies (1957), Writing Degree Zero (1953), S/Z (1970), The Pleasure of the Text (1975). Barthes's Mythologies (1957) interrogated specific cultural materials in order to expose how bourgeois society asserted its values through them.
The portrayal of wine in French society as a robust and healthy habit is a bourgeois ideal that is contradicted by the reality that wine can be unhealthy and inebriating. He found semiotics useful. Roland Barthes' death was tragic. He was knocked down by a laundry van while walking home through the streets of Paris.
To try to write love is to confront the muck of
language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too
little, excessive and impoverished.
Historically and politically,
the petit-bourgeois is the key to the century. The bourgeois and
proletariat
classes have become abstractions: the petite-bourgeoisie, in contrast, is
everywhere, you can see it everywhere, even in the areas of the bourgeois and
the proletariat, what's left of them.
The politician being
interviewed clearly takes a great deal of trouble to imagine an ending to his
sentence: and if he stopped short? His entire policy would be jeopardized!