Text Theory of Roland Barthesand Its Semiological Study on The Scarlet LetterLee, Kangno (Kwangju Health College)Literary works are generally said to have objective meaning which the reader should search for. New Critics shifted the source of meaning traditionally assigned to the author to the text itself. And the structuralists sought the grammar of literature in which the literary structure and meanings are found. Post structuralists such as Barthes and Derrida were the first to confront the problem of the sign and of the closure of meaning through the concept of the text developed in its post-structuralist sense.Whereas the work is a finished object, the text is presented as the field of free floating signifiers which are subject to no ultimate signified. Barthes suggests two kinds of text according to its textual characteristics. Writerly text is a text where the reader can write it again in many different ways and interpretations which would only consist in desseminating the original text. Readerly text is somewhat like a classical work in which the reader can read and write the text with ease and pleasure. Barthes also introduces a semiological method of analysis on myth and readerly text.According to Barthes, writing is the singifier of the literary myth which receives from the concept of literature a new signification. The Scarlet Letter may be a kind of myth in which the scarlet letter A as an empty signifier practices the infinite deferral of the signified and reveals an ideology of puritanism through significaton.