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Roland Barthes: Major Works and Ideas

Major Works

Major Ideas
1. "From Work to Text"
2. "The Myth Today"
3. The Other Related Concepts

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I. Major Work

  1. first stage: Marxist-- Writing Degree Zero (1953)  to Mythologies (1957)

  2. second stage: Structuralist -- Mythologies -- The Fashion Design  (The Death of the Author in 1967, also the year of publication of Writing and Difference)

  3. third stage: post-structuralist -- S/Z

  4. fourth stage: physical experience of reading, autobiography (Roland Barthes on Roland Barthes), A Lover's Discourse, On photography (Camera Lucida).

II. Major Ideas
Barthes is hard to categorized in some way.  He is Marxist (influenced by Sartre, Marx and Brecht), structuralist (influenced by Saussure and Levi-Strauss) and then post-structuralist (influenced by Lacan, Foucault, Derrida and Kristeva).

I.  "From Work to Text" -- The Text is a "methodological field," a structured but de-centered field of signs, rather then a portion of the space of books, an entity, which is the work. (Ref.  "From Work to Text" ½Ð¨£µÛ§@ªí)
 

work

text

1. concrete; 

1. a methodological field; 2. Subverting old classification

3. closes itself on a signified

3. sign; 4. Plural; intertextual (77); 

  1. caught up in a process of filiation 

  2. object of consumption

  1. without the father's signature

  2. process of meaning; splitting of signs; play; jouissance

  • The distinction between the writerly (writable) text and readerly (readable) text; pleasure of reading (enjoyable, nameable) and jouissance (revolutionary, shocking, cannot be articulated)
     

    the writerly (writable) text =
    text de jouissance

    readerly (readable) text
    text de plaisir

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II. "The Myth Today": 1. Myth is a type of speech; 2. Study of myth is both formal and ideological;  3. second-order signification  (½Ð¨£µÛ§@ªí)

  
Language

Myth

1. Signifier

2.Signified

 

 

3. Sign
I. Signifier (form with meanings)

II. Signified (concept)

III. Sign

      • "the form does not suppress the meaning, it only impoverishes it, it puts it at a distance, it holds it at one's disposal.
          " (118)

      • "myth hides nothing; its function is to distort." (123)

      • "Its [The mythical signifier] form is empty but present, its meaning absent but full." (124)

      • 3 kinds of reading:

        1. producer of myth

        2. decoder of myth

        3. consumer of myth
           

    3. Barthes in Mythologies

      -- discuss the contradictory surface and latent meanings in cultural incidences;
      -- disclose the inherent meanings of the ritual of wrestle (which is not a sport but a spectacle); -- critiques the ideologies underly popular culture, such as colonialism, sexism (gender stereotypes such as Garbo and Audrey Hepburn), etc.

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Ref. Dick Hebdige on Punk Style
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  • Dick Hebdige thinks that Levi-Strauss's concept of "homology" can be used to read punk subculture as a third level of discourse.  Punk style "deconstruct" itself by representing the experience of class contradictions in the forms of visual puns, bondage, ripped tee shirts and the link.  In linguistic terms, these stylistic signifiers of sex and class refer to other signifiers, not to signifieds.
  • As a result, punk style becomes a "dislocated, ironic, and self-aware" third-level discourse signalling the values of contradiction, disruption, and process.
    1. Hebdige uses as support Resistance Through Rituals, in which the authors use the concepts of homology and bricolage to explain how a certain subcultural style appeal to a particular group of people.
    2. "The skinheads were cited to exemplify this principle.  The boots, braces, and cropped hair were only considered appropriate and hence meaningful because they communicated the desired qualities: 'hardness, masculity and workingclassness.'" (Praxis, 184)

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reference: 1. Structuralism and Semiotics pp. 123-134 (focus: 123-25; 130-34); R. Barthes "Myth Today"

III. The Other Related Concepts

  • Discourse: Any interfacing between a subject and another thing that provides information. For example, by watching a film, the viewer is actively involved with creating the film in the viewers mind. The viewer puts a personal mark upon the film, and the film becomes the viewers. Then the film adds or subtracts from the notions that the viewer had created.
  • Semiotics, Semiosis, Semiology: The noun form of the study of signs and signification, the process of attaching signifieds to signifiers, the study of signs and signifying systems.
  • Signifier: It's in some ways a substitute. Words, both oral and written are signifiers. The brain then exchanges the signifier for a working definition. For example let us consider the word "tree", you can't make a log cabin out of the word "tree"; you could however make a log cabin out of what the brain substitutes for the input "tree" which would be some type of icon.
    • Signs
    • symbol: stands in place of an object; flags, the crucifix, bathroom door signs.
    • index: "points" to something. It is an indicator. i.e. words like "big" and arrows etc.
    • icon: a representation of an object that produces a mental image of the object represented. For example, a picture of a tree evokes the same mental image regardless of language. The picture of a tree conjures up "tree" in the brain.
  • Signified: Is what the signifier refers to. (See signifier). There are two types of signifieds:
  • connotative: points to the signified but has a deeper meaning. An example provided by Barthes can be found in S/Z on page 62. "Tree" = luxuriant green, shady, etc...
  • denotative: What the signified actually is, quite like a definition, but in brain language.
  • Skidding: When meaning moves due to a signifier calling on multiple signifieds.
  • Hermenuetics: Differs from exegesis in that it is less "practical." It is the text that postpones and even breaks with itself to shift meaning through skidding.
  • Exegesis: Interpretation of content only. that searches for meaning connotatively.
  • Writerly text: is a text that discomforts; it creates a subject position for the reader that is outside of the mores or cultural base of the reader.
  • Starred text: (from S/Z) is where the text "breaks;" where a deeper level of meaning can be followed. The stars occur at these locations, which are ambiguously chosen.
  • Language exists on two axes.
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