Introduction: Barthes’s relevance today
Introduction: Barthes’s relevance today

Summary/Abstract: Roland Barthes (1915–1980) was one of the leading scholars who developed semiotics into an academic discipline and gave it intellectual credibility in the latter half of the 20th century. Barthes’s theoretical reflection and analytical case-studies covered a vast field. His work on theory was based on Ferdinand de Saussure and Louis Hjelmslev, but his texts refer also to Roman Jakobson, Sigmund Freud, the Ancient philosophers and rhetoricians, and even to Charles S. Peirce. In casestudies, he focused on topics as diverse as, for example, toys, cars, cinema, photography, cities, fashion, and literature, which remained central all through his career. It is fair to say that Barthes’s importance for semiotics is matched only by few exceptional figures, such as Juri Lotman, Umberto Eco, and Algirdas J. Greimas.

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