Semiologist, existentialist, writer on art, design, thought, popular culture, photography, film – even Barthes himself was decidedly inconsistent in his attempts to define himself. Barthes’s thinking has influenced the development of theories of structuralism, semiotics, social theory, design, anthropology and post structuralism. 
Often thought of as Roland Barthes’s most accessible text, Mythologies turns out to be wonderfully elusive.  One hundred years and three weeks after Barthes’s birth, Michael Wood and Ben Kafka will discuss the impact of this little book on their work as critics and scholars of literature, film, history, and psychoanalysis. 

Ben Kafka is a psychoanalyst, cultural historian, and critic. Author of The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (Zone Books, 2012), he teaches at NYU and sees patients in private practice.

Michael Wood is Emeritus Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University.  He is the author of America in the Movies, a study of Buñuel’s Belle de jour, and of books on Nabokov, Kafka and García Márquez, as well as The Road to Delphi, a study of the ancient and continuing allure of oracles. He is film critic of the London Review of Books and writes regularly on film and literature for the New York Review of Books.   His recent publications include Literature and the Taste of Knowledge, Yeats and Violence and Alfred Hitchcock: the Man Who Knew Too Much.