In a single day, how many really non-signifying fields do we cross? Very few, sometimes none. Here I am before the sea; it is true that it bears no message. But on the beach, what material for semiology! Pennants, slogans, signals, signboards, clothes, suntan even, which are so many messages to me.

                                    Mythologies

To speak of Roland Barthes's Mythologies and their influence means going back for a moment to the Paris of the 1950s in which they were written. For this was not only the period of Existentialism, of Camus and particularly, in Barthes's case, of Sartre, but already the prelude to what was to be a methodological explosion in the human sciences.

At the time, the study of myth was a privileged site for the debates and intellectual upheavals now associated with structuralism, a debate which is summed up in Claude Levi-Strauss's questioning of traditional approaches and...