The work of Roland Barthes is apparently highly varied, both in its object (literature, clothes, cinema, painting, advertising, music, news items, etc.) and in its method and ideology. Le Degré zéro de l'Écriture (1953) seemed to extend into the domain of "form" the reflection begun by Sartre some years earlier on the social situation of literature and the responsibility of the writer before history—a reflection on the frontiers of existentialism and Marxism. His Michelet (1954), though offered as a simple, "precritical" reading, borrowed from Gaston Bachelard the idea of a substantial psychoanalysis and showed what a thematic study of the material imagination could bring to the understanding of a work regarded hitherto as essentially ideological. His work for the review Théâtre populaire and in the struggle waged around that review to introduce the work and theories of Bertolt Brecht into France brought him a reputation, in...