The Semiotic Challenge

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by Roland Barthes,

Translated by Richard Howard

University of California Press

Due/Published September 1994, pages, paper

ISBN 0520087844

Reissued

"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--n 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.

"[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 confregrave;res 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