[Barthes] has powerful opponents at home, but I doubt whether there will be much raising of voices here, and the reason is not simply that we are insular. Although Barthes is famous for recondite meditations on the sign-structures not only of literature but of what you never thought had sign-structures, like menus, fashions and furniture, so qualifying as an adventurous structuralist, he rarely refers to any language except French, or to any literature except French. Thus in Writing Degree Zero there is a far-reaching discussion of the French preterite, a tense that now belongs to a written, not a spoken language, and which is treated as 'the corner-stone of Narration', an expression of an order and a euphoria peculiar to the novel; it redeemed time, saved meaning out of an existential mess; but now that we see it for what it is, a comfortable lie, the whole face...