Empire of Signs

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Roland Barthes

Hill and Wang, New York, 1982, English

Nonfiction, Art and Cultural History

ISBN: 9780374522070

From the Publisher. With this book, Barthes offers a broad-ranging meditation on the culture, society, art, literature, language, and iconography—in short, both the sign-oriented realities and fantasies—of Japan itself.

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Marco Romanelli

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Sometimes a book is a key: Empire of Signs was my key to Japan. I read it as a university student, but I never forgot concepts like what it means to wrap a present or the discovery of haiku poetry (so similar to the expression of a well-designed object).

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