These are still the Banquet Years in France, though not everyone will savor the feast of books and essays produced there since 1945. One might have thought that Jean-Paul Sartre, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Maurice Merleau-Ponty had exhausted a certain vein. Philosophy and literature invaded each other's realm; science mingled with cultural criticism. Yet Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and others are still taking on linguistics, semiotics, structuralism, sociology and psychoanalysis. New and fantastic words appear on the scene to express this mixture of disciplines: "economimesis," "anasematics," "mimology." It is a heady period of scribbledihobble.

There is a danger to literature in this Parisian plenty, for it loses part of its privilege. Literature is seen as one kind of "inscription" or sign system among others. Semiology, the study of signs, nourishes this tendency; and Roland Barthes, its most protean and engaging prophet, is as interested in the culture...