ABSTRACT
Few texts can convey the crucial insights of structuralism while, at the same time, anticipating the reaction against it, loosely termed post-structuralism, and defending structuralism against the charge that it is simply a more scientific formalism and, as such, just as apolitical. Roland Barthes's ‘Myth Today’ (Reading 1.1) meets these requirements so successfully that it is hard to accept 1957 as the publication date for Mythologies, the book which collects a number of case studies of contemporary culture and rounds them off with such a stunning theoretical excursus.
