Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

With this book, Barthes offers a broad-ranging meditation on the culture, society, art, literature, language, and iconography--in short, both the sign-oriented realities and fantasies--of Japan itself.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Kirkus Book Review

Brief appreciations of things Japanese, of the ""richness, mobility, and subtlety"" of the Japanese ""exchange of signs"": published in France in 1970, and Barthes at his most seductive. These are the observations of every traveler, translated (without strain) into recognitions. ""The dinner tray seems a picture of the most delicate order""; it is actually a palette, ""with which you are going to play in the course of your meal. . ."" (In the next piece: ""by chopsticks, food becomes no longer a prey to which one does violence . . . but a substance harmoniously transferred."") And this sequence of thoughts leads Barthes to remark on the absence of a center, ""a precious heart,"" a deep meaning (""food is never anything but a collection of fragments""). There then comes Tokyo: a city with an ""empty"" center, the forbidden grounds of the (figurehead) Emperor's palace. Japan not only affords Barthes a profusion of complex signs, it suites his penchant for the formal--and for non-meaning, the absence of a symbolic charge. ""The haiku is not a rich thought reduced to a brief form, but a brief event which immediately finds its proper form."" Thus, also, the reflections on bowing; on Bunraku puppets; on the Zengakuren riots (""a great scenario of signs"" climaxing in a purely vocal exercise--""The Zengakuren are going to fight""--without a subject or stated cause.) The Bunraku reflections echo the Bunraku piece included by Susan Sontag in A Barthes Reader (p. 621)--where Empire of Signs is lauded but not directly represented. The book is small and, even with 18 black-and-white illustrations, pricey. There is more concentrated pleasure here, however--along with fewer stylistic and other impediments--than in major works of the canon. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Roland Barthes (1915-1980), a French critic and intellectual, was a seminal figure in late twentieth-century literary criticism. Barthes's primary theory is that language is not simply words, but a series of indicators of a given society's assumptions. He derived his critical method from structuralism, which studies the rules behind language, and semiotics, which analyzes culture through signs and holds that meaning results from social conventions. Barthes believed that such techniques permit the reader to participate in the work of art under study, rather than merely react to it.

Barthes's first books, Writing Degree Zero (1953), and Mythologies (1957), introduced his ideas to a European audience. During the 1960s his work began to appear in the United States in translation and became a strong influence on a generation of American literary critics and theorists.

Other important works by Barthes are Elements of Semiology (1968), Critical Essays (1972), The Pleasure of the Text (1973), and The Empire of Signs (1982). The Barthes Reader (1983), edited by Susan Sontag, contains a wide selection of the critic's work in English translation.

(Bowker Author Biography)