Critic. He was skeptical of earlier forms of literary criticism and helped develop both literary semiotics (also called semiology) and structuralism, two critical techniques that swept academe in Europe and the United States and that carried large implications for valuation in general. Because of the characteristic opacity of their sometimes shamanic utterances, semioticians and structuralists have often been parodied. But the core of semiotics is to focus on forms of communication, both verbal and non-verbal, and the core of literary structuralism is to look for common underlying "structures" in widely variant languages and texts. This is in turn part of a wider structuralist effort to discover common underlying "structures" in different human cultures.