There were parts where I think I grasped the point but would have welcomed more examples, there were other parts where I had no idea what was being said. ( )

This is a very successful attempt to comprehensively convey the thinking of a chameleon such as the French (post) structuralist Roland Barthes (1915-1980). Jonathan Culler nicely separates the different aspects of Barthes' personality and work and also sketches the evolution he went through. He is not afraid to point to the contradictions in that work and he clearly expresses his preference for the systematic scientist that Barthes was at the start of his career, the semiotic, in comparison with the multiformity of his later oeuvre. For indeed, that someone who once pronounced "the death of the author" returned to a penetrating study of authors such as Flaubert and Proust at the end of his career can provoke astonishment. But Culler makes clear that although Barthes may be placed in the list of structuralists such as Levi-Strauss, Foucault and Lacan, he always remained his wayward self. The only thing I missed in this booklet was the link that can clearly be found between French semiotics and what is called "the linguistic turn" in Anglo-Saxon circles (Hayden White and others). ( )

Culler's introduction to Barthes is better than Barthes' actual ideas; the older Roland got the more nonsensical and silly his ideas got... and then he got hit by a laundry truck, one of the silliest deaths in intellectual history. Culler's analysis is sympathetic but also critical. It might be a good idea for most intellectuals to read this, because his criticism of Barthes' late infatuation with 'the body' is relevant to so many of them/us: why bother going through ideology critique, why bother revealing the way that we all treat out beliefs about the world as natural facts about the world, if you're just going to base your thought on a quasi-natural concept like the body? Nice for you that you can hold onto that liberal-conservative world-view and justify it by such a 'radical' epistemology; not so nice for those who don't benefit from that liberal-conservative world-view.

This isn't a substitute for reading Barthes, but it did a good job of encouraging me to read Mythologies and S/Z. Not much more you could ask for from a meta-literary-critic. ( )