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Roland Barthes
The Semiotic Challenge
Translated from the French by Richard Howard.
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$21.95, £12.95 paperback
978-0-520-08784-2
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293 pages,
September 1994, Available worldwide
Categories: Literary Studies; Literary Theory & Criticism; Philosophy

"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
Most of these essays were written between 1963 and 1973 and constitute either the elements of the semiotic discipline or the analysis of texts—ranging from the Bible to advertising—in order to determine the site of possible meanings in narratives. Intent on discovering signification's importance in art as well as life, Barthes sets up a rigorous system and puts it to work.
Roland Barthes was born in 1915 and studied French literature and classics at the University of Paris. After teaching French at universities in Romania and Egypt, he joined the Centre National 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.