Roland Barthes is best
known as a semiologist, a student of the science
of signs. This sees human beings primarily
as communicating animals, and looks at the
way they use language, clothes, gestures,
hair styles, visual images, shapes and colour
to convey to one another their tastes, their
emotions, their ideal self-image and the values
of their society.
Introducing
Barthes brilliantly elucidates Barthes' application
of these ideas to literature, popular culture,
clothes and fashion, and explains why his
thinking in this area made him a key figure
in the structuralist movement of the 1960s.
It goes on to 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. This is the perfect companion
volume to Introducing Semiotics.
***
Philip Thody is Professor of French Literature
at the University of Leeds until 1993. He
was also the author of Introducing Sartre.
He died in 1999.
Piero
is an illustrator, artist and graphic designer
whose work has twice been included in the
Royal College of Art in London. He has illustrated
many Introducing titles.
