"To read through a Barthes Reader is finally to be left with the image of Barthes as one of the great public teachers of our time, someone who thought out, argued for, and made available several steps in a penetrating reflection on language sign systems, texts - and what they have to tell us about the concept of being human. His work is always partial, passionate underneath its cool, and preliminary, ready to be superseded or contradicted, perhaps in the next essay by Barthes himself. Yet its pedagogical power is durable...Susan Sontag has contributed a prefatory essay which is one of her finest acts of criticisms, informed by intellectual sympathy and a sure sense of the contours of the mind she is describing." -- from back wrapper. Edited and introduced by Sontag.