Roland Barthes

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Roland Barthes

• Mythologies, myth, ideology

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Roland Barthes (1915-1980) Mythologies
Barthes mythologies are 54 essays, published
biweekly in the magazine Les Lettres nouvelles
between 1954-56.
They are one of the founding texts of cultural
and media studies. In them, Barthes demonstrated
that it is possible to read the products of mass
culture for philosophical and political insights.
As such, they also offer opportunities for
dissent, for the semiotician to intervene in
public discourse. Heres Barthes himself on the
role of the intellectual.
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For Barthes, like Adorno Horkheimer, ideology
and operates at the level of entertainment, of
popular culture (magazines, film, television,
mass spectacle) For example Wrestling
matches Soap and detergent Billy Grahams revival
meetings The Eiffel Tower Shock-photographs and
so on.
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Ideology hides in plain sight. For Barthes,
ideology works at the level of the obvious. It is
common sense, whatever we find natural and
self-evident. Ideology is just the way things
are. This is what he calls myth narratives that
explain how the world works. The objects of
popular culture tell us stories that explain our
world, history, and society. Mythology is the
analysis of these stories.
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Morphology (study of the formation of
words) Morpheme (the smallest language unit that
carries a semantic interpretation)
Mythology (for Barthes, the study of the
formation of myths. Myth A narrative that
explains how the world works. It furnished the
ancients with world-pictures, but in modernity it
appears as ideology. Mytheme (unit of myth,
combined together in particular myths)
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Mythology is a study of rhetoric (the art of
persuasion, of using language, images and sounds
to achieve effects)

• Myth Today is about the techniques of
  rhetorical analysis.
• The point of mythlogy is to unmask or debunk
  myths
• Inoculation
• Privation of history
• Identification
• Tautology
• Neither-norism
• Quantification of quality reification
• Statement of fact