Roland Barthes

The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies is a collection of essays by the French literary theorist Roland Barthes. It is a companion volume to his earlier book Mythologies and follows the same format of a series of short essays which explore a range of cultural phenomena, from the Tour de France to laundry detergents.

S/Z, published in 1970, is Roland Barthes's structuralist analysis of "Sarrasine", the short story by Honoré de Balzac. Barthes methodically moves through the text of the story, denoting where and how different codes of meaning function. Barthes's study has had a major impact on literary criticism and is historically …