In 1976 Roland Barthes was appointed chair of literary semiology and elected to the Collège de France--the highest position in the French academic system. His lifelong pursuit of formally interpreting the sign systems that make up culture from literature and biography to wrestling and restaurant menus was finally fully recognized. Together with the French academy's acknowledgment of Barthes's force as a seminal intellectual figure, these two events reflect also his worldwide recognition as a critic, writer, and thinker. Put simply, if Barthes had not developed his particular strain of "semiology"--a system for decrypting social life as ideologically motivated textual signs, springing from Ferdinand de Saussure's theories of how language signifies--contemporary scholarship in the humanities would not be the same. Barthes extended de Saussure's linguistic theory to include all textual representations in everyday life. His massive intellectual range and production--writing dozens of critical studies on literature and...