Abstract

Roland Barthes is one of the great figures of late twentieth-century French philosophy and critical theory, a writer of gargantuan appetite for enquiry, encompassing linguistics, semiology, structuralism and post-structuralism, and its manifestations across a broad range of media, from verbal text to visual image and music, and from classical literature to architecture, film, fashion and advertising. His work is largely concerned with the philosophy of communication, and not only ranges across a broad spectrum of communicative media, but also moves between opposite poles of scientific rationalism and creative pleasure.