ESSAYS SELECTED AND TRANSLATED BY STEPHEN HEATH 'Image-Music-Text' brings together major essays by Roland Barthes on the structural analysis of narrative and on issues in literary theory, on the semiotics of photograph and film, on the practice of music and voice. Throughout the volume runs a constant movement 'from work to text': an attention to the very ‘grain’ of signifying activity an…
S/Z is the linguistic distillation of Barthes's system of semiology, a science of signs and symbols, in which a Balzac novella, Sarrasine, is dissected semantically in order to uncover layers of unsuspected meanings and connotations. In the process, Barthes reveals the immeasurably fecund nature of language. His interpretation of language and meaning within the structuralist mode offers an alto…