Here's a good post fromThe Reading Experience on General Symbolic Interpretation. A couple of comments.

1) The proposal to study all sorts of phenomena--clothes, popular entertainment, advertisements--is part of Roland Barthes' semiotic project of 40 years ago. We've been hearing this sort of talk for years. Even in Kenneth Burke's project of studying symbolic action, whether in literature or not.

2) Yet Barthes was very committed to studying literature as well. He constantly emphasizes the specificity of literature.

3) Barthes would not have seen this "anthropological" project as incompatible with the study of literature, but he would not have emphasized interpretation, or "symbol-mongering." He would have been more in tune with Sontag's "erotics of art." Of course, Sontag was influenced by Barthes and similar writers.