ABSTRACT
To observe the practical consequences of applying linguistic models in other fields we might look at two projects that are exemplary in different ways. Roland Barthes’s Système de la mode has been praised by other structuralists for its ‘methodological rigour’: ‘it would be difficult to imagine a better illustration of the semiological method’.1 More explicitly based on linguistics than Barthes’s work on literature, it illustrates the difficulties that arise when one tries to use linguistics in a particular way and thus offers a warning that should be heeded in other attempts. Moreover, Barthes sees a close analogy between fashion and literature:
The second example, Lévi-Strauss’s Mythologiques,2 is the most extensive structural analysis ever undertaken, and the obvious affinities between myth and literature make his procedures relevant to any discussion of structuralism in literary criticism.
