SOURCE: de Man, Paul. “Roland Barthes and the Limits of Structuralism.” In Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism: The Gauss Seminar and Other Papers, edited by E. S. Burt, Kevin Newmark, and Andrzej Warminski, pp. 164-77. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.

In the following essay, written in 1972, de Man discusses Barthes's ideas in Mythologies and several other works and notes that Barthes's theory of the impossibility of ultimate signification also calls into question the logic of any type of literary criticism.

Despite the refinements of modern means of international communication, the relationship between Anglo-American and continental—especially French—literary criticism remains a star-crossed story, plagued by a variety of time lags and cultural gaps. The French have only just gotten around to translating an essay by Empson,¹ and by the time American works of literary theory or literary criticism appear in Paris, they often have lost much of their youthful...