Semiotic Challenge - Softcover

Barthes, Roland

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0809015382 ISBN 13: 9780809015382

Publisher: Hill & Wang Pub, 1988

Synopsis

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

About this title

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 "confreres 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

About the Author

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 College de France until his death in 1980.

Edition details

• Publisher: Hill & Wang Pub
• Publication date: 1988
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0809015382
• ISBN 13: 9780809015382
• Binding: Paperback