"If Peirce and the Swiss linguist Saussure were the great theorists of semiotics, Barthes was, quite likely, its most ingenious and brilliant practitioner. This book, like all his works, is full of remarkable insights and dazzling interpretations."—Arthur Asa Berger, San Francisco Chronicle Review

"[In The Semiotic Challenge] Barthes . . . proceed[s] to carve up the text of Genesis into signifying units, decompose narratives into their syntagmatic and paradigmatic codes, shift with aplomb from the rhetoric of Balzac to that of beefsteak. The outraged professors of the Sorbonne, not to speak of their scandalized liberal-empiricist confrères across the Channel, could not complain that this was done with anything but the most impeccable sang-froid—a grave, poker-faced parody of conventional scholarship whose serene, fastidious tones barely conceal the most impudently subversive of intents."—Terry Eagleton, Times Literary Supplement