Tom Nicholas
Literary Texts: Introduction to Cultural Texts and Roland Barthes' From Work to Text
Roland Barthes' From Work to Text is a seminal essay which lays out why, in the humanities, we have come to refer to pieces of literature, films and many other things using the catch-all term "text". Because, we refer a lot to reading a...
Tom Nicholas
Structuralism and Semiotics: WTF? Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes and Structuralism Explained
Structuralism is a form of literary theory which, inspired by semiotics and the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, emerged in France in the 1950s. In this week’s episode of What the Theory?, we take a look at how structuralism and...
Tom Nicholas
The Death of the Author: WTF? Roland Barthes' Death of the Author Explained
Roland Barthes’ The Death of the Author is a seminal text in the development of literary theory. Often considered the moment when structuralism gave way to poststructuralism as the dominant approach to cultural analysis, in The Death of...