Roland Barthes vs. Franz Kafka
Side-by-side comparison of two thinkers
Roland Barthes
1915 – 1980
Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. His work engaged in the analysis of a variety of sign systems, mainly derived from Western popular culture. His ideas explored a diverse range of fields, including structuralism, anthropology, literary theory, and post-structuralism, and influenced the development of multiple schools of theory.
"The politician being interviewed clearly takes a great deal of trouble to imagine an ending to his sentence: and if he stopped short? His entire policy would be…"
Franz Kafka
1894 – 1924
Franz Kafka was a German-language Jewish Czech writer and novelist born in Prague, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Widely regarded as a major figure of 20th-century literature, his works fuse elements of realism and the fantastique, and typically feature isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surreal predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. The term Kafkaesque has entered the lexicon to describe situations like those depicted in his writings.
"May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air."