"Madeleine had met Leonard in an upper-level semiotics seminar taught by a renegade from the English department. Michael Zipperstein had arrived at Brown thirty-two years earlier filled with zeal for the New Criticism. He’d inculcated the habits of close reading and biography-free interpretation into three generations of students before taking a Road to Damascus sabbatical, in Paris, in 1975, where he’d met Roland Barthes at a dinner party and been converted, over duck cassoulet, to the new faith."

http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2010/06/07/100607fi_fiction_eugenides?printable=true#ixzz0s03IPWnM