Books/Writings
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Roland Barthes
1915 – 1980
French

Critic. He was skeptical of earlier forms of literary criticism and helped develop both literary semiotics (also called semiology) and structuralism, two critical techniques that swept academe in Europe and the United States and that carried large implications for valuation in general. Because of the characteristic opacity of their sometimes shamanic utterances, semioticians and structuralists have often been parodied. But the core of semiotics is to focus on forms of communication, both verbal and non-verbal, and the core of literary structuralism is to look for common underlying "structures" in widely variant languages and texts. This is in turn part of a wider structuralist effort to discover common underlying "structures" in different human cultures.

Contemporaries
1909–1943Simone Weil
1881–1955Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
1847–1922Georges Sorel
1871–1922Marcel Proust
1915–1968Thomas Merton
1882–1973Jacques Maritain
1859–1947Pierre Janet
1869–1951André Gide
1862–1921Georges Feydeau
1859–1941Henri Bergson