1. Clifford Geertz, “The Cerebral Savage: On the Work of Claude Lévi-Strauss,”, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 356.
2. Louis Hjelmslev, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, cit. Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 7.
3. Geertz, “Art as a Cultural System,”, Local Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 118.
4. See Fredric Jameson, “His Classic Mythologies Paved the Way for the Triumphant Entry of the Estrangement-Effect into French Theory,”, Brecht and Method (London: Verso, 1998), 38.
5. On the importance of Brecht to Barthes at this point in the latter’s career, I am indebted to the insights of Larysa Smirnov’s remarkable doctoral dissertation, Roland Barthes in Search of an ‘Epic’ Modernity (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 2007).