The semiotic challenge - Tapa blanda

"[In "The Semiotic Challenge] Barthes . . . proceed[s] to carve up the text of Genesis into signifying units, decompose narratives into their syntagmatic and paradigmatic codes, shift with aplomb from the rhetoric of Balzac to that of beefsteak. The outraged professors of the Sorbonne, not to speak of their scandalized liberal-empiricist "confreres across the Channel, could not complain that this was done with anything but the most impeccable "sang-froid--a grave, poker-faced parody of conventional scholarship whose serene, fastidious tones barely conceal the most impudently subversive of intents."--Terry Eagleton, "Times Literary Supplement

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