The Rustle of Language is a collection of forty-five essays, written between 1967 and 1980, on language, literature, and teaching—the pleasure of the text—in an authoritative translation by Richard Howard.

Roland Barthes was born in 1915 and studied French literature and classics at the University of Paris. After teaching French at universities in Rumania and Egypt, he joined the Centre de Recherche Scientifique, where he devoted himself to research in sociology and lexicology. He was a professor at the Collège de France until his death in 1980.

"Barthes' career was an exemplary search for understanding how man creates meaning, a lifelong exploration of man's definition as homo significans, the maker of meaning in signs. In anthropology, in linguistics, philosophy, and the discourse upon literature, this has been a characteristic preoccupation of our age, and no one addressed himself to it so persistently, so multifariously, so ingeniously, as Barthes."—Peter Brooks, The New Republic

"In The Rustle of Language, the typically Barthesian texture of the writing makes itself felt. That texture—delightful to many of us—is composed of the mutual jostling of many (often mutually incompatible) registers of discourse. Linguistics, literature, philosophy, . . . history, semantics, Marxism—these are only the commonest of the many categories that organize Barthes' thinking. . . . In all of these essays, the briskness and liveliness of Barthes's style makes the work interesting."—Helen Vendler, New York Review of Books