Thorough,comprehensive leviathan on semiotics and its placement within the field of structuralism gets my top marks. Noth leaves no stone unturned, combining historical analysis of its roots in structuralism from its Pierce, Morris, Saussure, Hjelmslev and Jakobson beginnings through Barthes, structuralism, Post and Neo structuralism to present day applications such as in drama, myth, ideology, rhetoric, nonverbal and visual communication(aesthetics, advertizing or comics for example). Very thorough, and useful I found for quick-to-reference definitions of terms, and placing the mass of scholarship within the field and correlating fields depending on its applications. Being a Cultural Studies/Media Studies phD student, what I found most helpful from this text was Noth's ability to span such a vast breadth of areas we study in my discipline, in such a cohesive way. Taking a class one semester on say a Foucauldian strand of structuralism, and a survey class another semester that included several structuralist readings (Althusser, Barthes, Levi-Strauss) amidst a quagmire of other cultural theory, didn't connect the dots for me per se on the wider structuralist debate,its history and evolution of movements, and the many different 'threads' and applications across the disciplines that it produced,including how Barthes's pioneering work in semiology led over time to become a weighty branch of the structuralist tree. My recent enlightenment, thus,leaves me wishing it had been assigned or even recommended during (emphasis on "during") my coursework(I stumbled upon it myself during dissertation research). What my professors were teaching would have made a lot more sense at the time!
