How To Imagine Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes, the French master, enjoyed the undoubted status, but he was also a theorist who was difficult to understand. In accordance with Barthes' achievements, Jonathon Culler concluded his ten cultural identities: a versatile person, literary historian, mythologist, critic, polemicist, semioticist, structuralist, hedonist, writer, and scholar. Though it has been more 40 years since he was introduced to China, it is still not easy for us to recognize his specific "identity" in China for the reason that he was introduced as various theorists in diverse fields in the different historic situations. The translation and reception studies of Roland Barthes have been almost corresponded with the progress of China's academic research and waves, which could be divided into three phases. In the early hot wave of philosophic research, Barthes was regarded as a philosopher and introduced in the philosophical schools. Later, he became a literary theorist especially at the time of prevalence of literary research methodologies, when his relevant theory was introduced in abundance and even exaggerated to be mysterious. In the recent booming of cultural studies, Barthes is a cultural scholar as well as a literary theorist, thus becoming a cultural master of theorizing and practicing in essays, mass culture and visual culture. The history of translation and reception of Roland Barthes can, to some extent, illustrate how China received foreign schools of thoughts, which can be concluded as practical method of "being used for our own purpose". We can learn some experiences and lessons from the studies on the history of his translation and reception and thus have to think about the following question: How should we translate and receive a foreign theorist?...