About the Author

Roland Barthes was born in 1915 and studied French literature and the 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.

Reviews

"Barthes's career was an exemplary search for understanding how man creates meaning, a lifelong exploration of man's definition as "Homo significans, "the maker of meaning in signs. In anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, and the discourse upon literature, this has been a characteristic preoccupation of our age, and no one addressed himself to it so persistently, so multifariously, so ingeniously, as Barthes." --Peter Brooks, " The New Republic"