From the Encyclopædia Britannica: (born Nov. 12, 1915, Cherbourg, France—died March 25, 1980, Paris), French essayist and social and literary critic whose writings on semiotics, the formal study of symbols and signs pioneered by Ferdinand de Saussure, helped establish structuralism and the New Criticism as leading intellectual movements.

Barthes studied at the University of Paris, where he took a degree in classical letters in 1939 and in grammar and philology in 1943. After working (1952–59) at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, he was appointed to the École Pratique des Hautes Études. In 1976 he became the first person to hold the chair of literary semiology at the Collège de France.

His first book, Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (1953; Writing Degree Zero), was a literary manifesto that examined the arbitrariness of the constructs of language. In subsequent books—including Mythologies (1957), Essais critiques (1964; Critical Essays), and La Tour Eiffel (1964; The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies)—he applied the same critical apparatus to the “mythologies” (i.e., the hidden assumptions) behind popular cultural phenomena from advertising and fashion to the Eiffel Tower and wrestling. His Sur Racine (1963; On Racine) set off a literary furor in France, pitting Barthes against traditional academics who thought this “new criticism,” which viewed texts as a system of signs, was desecrating the classics. Even more radical was S/Z (1970), a line-by-line semiological analysis of a short story by Honoré de Balzac in which Barthes stressed the active role of the reader in constructing a narrative based on “cues” in the text.

Barthes’s literary style, which was always stimulating though sometimes eccentric and needlessly obscure, was widely imitated and parodied. Some thought his theories contained brilliant insights, while others regarded them simply as perverse contrivances. But by the late 1970s Barthes’s intellectual stature was virtually unchallenged, and his theories had become extremely influential not only in France but throughout Europe and in the United States. Other leading radical French thinkers who influenced or were influenced by him included the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, socio-historian Michel Foucault, and philosopher Jacques Derrida.

Two of Barthes’s later books established his late-blooming reputation as a stylist and writer. He published an “antiautobiography,” Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes), and his Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse), an account of a painful love affair, was so popular it quickly sold more than 60,000 copies in France. Barthes died at the age of 64 from injuries suffered after being struck by an automobile. Several posthumous collections of his writings have been published, including A Barthes Reader (1982), edited by his friend and admirer Susan Sontag, and Incidents (1987). The latter volume revealed Barthes’s homosexuality, which he had not publicly acknowledged. Barthes’s Oeuvres complètes (“Complete Works”) were published in three volumes in 1993–95.

From the Encyclopædia Britannica: (born Nov. 26, 1857, Geneva, Switz.—died Feb. 22, 1913, Vufflens-le-Château), Swiss linguist whose ideas on structure in language laid the foundation for much of the approach to and progress of the linguistic sciences in the 20th century. While still a student, Saussure established his reputation with a brilliant contribution to comparative linguistics, Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes (1878; “Memoir on the Original System of Vowels in the Indo-European Languages”). In it he explained how the knottiest of vowel alternations in Indo-European, those of a, take place. Though he wrote no other book, he was enormously influential as a teacher, serving as instructor at the École des Hautes Études (“School of Advanced Studies”) in Paris from 1881 to 1891 and as professor of Indo-European linguistics and Sanskrit (1901–11) and of general linguistics (1907–11) at the University of Geneva. His name is affixed, however, to the Cours de linguistique générale (1916; Course in General Linguistics), a reconstruction of his lectures on the basis of notes by students carefully prepared by his junior colleagues Charles Bally and Albert Séchehaye. The publication of his work is considered the starting point of 20th-century structural linguistics.

Saussure contended that language must be considered as a social phenomenon, a structured system that can be viewed synchronically (as it exists at any particular time) and diachronically (as it changes in the course of time). He thus formalized the basic approaches to language study and asserted that the principles and methodology of each approach are distinct and mutually exclusive. He also introduced two terms that have become common currency in linguistics—“parole,” or the speech of the individual person, and “langue,” the system underlying speech activity. His distinctions proved to be mainsprings to productive linguistic research and can be regarded as starting points on the avenue of linguistics known as structuralism.

From the Encyclopædia Britannica:  (born June 24, 1941, Sliven, Bulg.), Bulgarian-born French psychoanalyst, critic, novelist, and educator, best known for her writings in structuralist linguistics, psychoanalysis, semiotics, and philosophical feminism. Kristeva received a degree in linguistics from the University of Sofia in 1966 and later that year immigrated to France on a doctoral fellowship. In Paris she worked with the structuralist and Marxist critic Lucien Goldmann, the social and literary critic Roland Barthes, and the structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. She soon became a member of the group of intellectuals associated with the journal Tel Quel, and her articles appeared in scholarly journals and in Maoist publications. Kristeva received her doctorate in linguistics in 1973 from the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Practical School of Advanced Studies). Her doctoral dissertation, La Révolution du langage poétique (1974; partial translation, Revolution in Poetic Language), was hailed for its application of psychoanalytic theory to language and literature. She was appointed to the faculty of linguistics at the University of Paris VII–Denis Diderot in 1974. In 1979 she became a practicing psychoanalyst.

Kristeva’s theories synthesized elements from such dissimilar thinkers as the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the French philosopher Michel Foucault, and the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. Two distinct trends characterize her writings: an early structuralist-semiotic phase and a later psychoanalytic-feminist phase. During the latter period Kristeva created a new study she called “semanalysis,” a combination of the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud and the semiology, or semiotics (the study of signs), of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. Her most important contribution to the philosophy of language was her distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic aspects of language. The semiotic, which is manifested in rhythm and tone, is associated with the maternal body. The symbolic, on the other hand, corresponds to grammar and syntax and is associated with referential meaning. With this distinction, Kristeva attempted to bring the “speaking body” back into linguistics and philosophy. She proposed that bodily drives are discharged in language and that the structure of language is already operating in the body.

From the Encyclopædia Britannica:   (born Nov. 17 [Nov. 5, Old Style], 1895, Orel, Russia—died March 7, 1975, Moscow, U.S.S.R.), Russian literary theorist and philosopher of language whose wide-ranging ideas significantly influenced Western thinking in cultural history, linguistics, literary theory, and aesthetics.

After graduating from the University of St. Petersburg (now St. Petersburg State University) in 1918, Bakhtin taught high school in western Russia before moving to Vitebsk (now Vitsyebsk, Belarus), a cultural centre of the region, where he and other intellectuals organized lectures, debates, and concerts. There Bakhtin began to write and develop his critical theories. Because of Stalinist censorship, he often published works under the names of friends, including P.N. Medvedev and V.N. Voloshinov. These early works include Freydizm (1927; Freudianism); Formalny metod v literaturovedeni (1928; The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship), an attack on the Formalists’ view of history; and Marksizm i filosofiya yazyka (1929; Marxism and the Philosophy of Language). Despite his precautions, Bakhtin was arrested in 1929 and exiled to the Kazakh Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. From 1945 to 1961 he taught at the Mordovian Teachers Training College.

Bakhtin is especially known for his work on the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Problemy tvorchestva Dostoyevskogo (1929; 2nd ed., 1963, retitled Problemy poetiki Dostoyevskogo; Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics), which he published under his own name just before he was arrested. It is considered one of the finest critical works on Dostoyevsky. In the book Bakhtin expressed his belief in a mutual relation between meaning and context involving the author, the work, and the reader, each constantly affecting and influencing the others, and the whole influenced by existing political and social forces. Bakhtin further developed this theory of polyphony, or “dialogics,” in Voprosy literatury i estetiki (1975; The Dialogic Imagination), in which he postulated that, rather than being static, language evolves dynamically and is affected by and affects the culture that produces and uses it. Bakhtin also wrote Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaya kultura srednevekovya i Renessansa (1965; Rabelais and His World).

From Monson, 1996: ‘… the idea of intermusicality … is something like intertextuality in sounds … a way to begin thinking about the particular ways in which music and, more generally, sound itself can refer to the past and offer social commentary.’

From Hertz, 1993: ‘Intertextuality … reduces everything to a text that must be read. Texture, a more neutral word than textual gives us a better metaphor to describe the true nature of interartistic activity, an activity that has occurred all along. … Creative works are made out of intertexturalities that move amongst the arts and the domain of idea.’