Roland Barthes (1915-80) was an 'incomparable enlivener of the literary mind' whose lifelong fascination was with 'the way people make their world intelligible'. He has a multifaceted claim to fame: to some he is the structuralist who outlined a 'science of literature', and the most prominent promoter of semiology; to others he stands not for science but pleasure, espousing literature which gives the reader a creative role. He called for 'the death of the author', urging that we study not writers but texts, yet he himself published idiosyncratic books rightly celebrated as imaginative products of a personal vision. Jonathan Culler elucidates the varied theoretical contributions of this 'public experimenter' and describes the many projects which Barthes explored.

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