Barthes: A Graphic Guide

What do language, clothes, gestures, hairstyles and visual images have in common? They’re all signs – and their study is called semiotics.

Roland Barthes’ work on structuralism during the 1960s expanded the field of semiotics into the analysis of popular culture, clothes and fashion. Introducing Barthes brilliantly elucidates his earlier work which studied language as a series of signs. Philip Thody and Piero then describe how his later insistence on pleasure, the delights of sexual non-conformity, and the freedom of the reader to interpret literary texts in the light of ideologies such as existentialism, Marxism and Freudianism, as well as structuralism itself, continues to make him one of the most dynamic and challenging of modern writers.