Roland BarthesThe work of Roland Barthes (1915-80), cultural theorist and analyst, embraces a wide range of cultural phenomena, including advertising, fashion, gastronomy, and wrestling. He focused on cultural phenomena as linguistic systems, and it is for this reason that we might consider him a structuralist. In these notes, I offer a brief profile of this influential figure, as well as a synopsis of his seminal essay, “Rhetoric of the Image,” a model for semiological analysis of all kinds.* * * * *This theorist and cultural analyst was born in Cherbourg, a port city northwest of Paris. His parents were Louis Barthes, a naval officer, and Henriette Binger. His father died in 1916, during combat in the North Sea. In 1924, Barthes and his mother moved to Paris, where he attended (1924-30) the Lycée Montaigne. Unfortunately, he spent long periods of his youth in sanatoriums, undergoing treatment for tuberculosis. Once recovered, he studied (1935-39) French and classics at the University of Paris. He was exempted from military service during the Second World War (he suffered from tuberculosis between 1941 and 1947). Later, while he was not undergoing treatment for tuberculosis, he taught in various schools, notably at the Voltaire and Carnot high schools. He taught at universities in Romania (1948-49) and Egypt (1949-50) before joining (in 1952) the National Center for Scientific Research, where he devoted himself to sociology and lexicology. steps. During the first phase, he focused on debunking stereotypes of bourgeois culture (as he puts it). For example, in Degree of Writing Zero (1953), Barthes questions the link between writing and biography: he studies the historical conditions of literary language and the difficulty of a modern practice of writing. Attached to language, he affirmed, the writer is at the same time caught in particular discursive orders, in socially instituted forms of writing, in a set of signs (a myth) of literature - hence the search for an unmarked language, before the closure of the myth, a zero degree of writing. During the years 1954-56, Barthes wrote a series of essays for the magazine Les Lettres nouvelles, in which he presented a "Mythology of the month", that is to say he showed how the denotations of the signs of popular culture betray connotations which are themselves “myths” generated by the larger system of signs which constitutes society. The book which contains these studies of everyday signs -- aptly, it is called Mythologies (1957) -- offers his meditations on many subjects, such as striptease, the New Citroën, steak and fries, etc...