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I.
Major Work
- first
stage: Marxist-- Writing Degree Zero (1953) to
Mythologies (1957)
- second
stage: Structuralist --
Mythologies
-- The Fashion Design (The
Death of the Author in 1967, also the year of publication of
Writing and Difference)
- third
stage: post-structuralist -- S/Z
- 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).
- "The
Death of the Author" (A summary by Ann Yang)
- 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.
 "From Work to Text"
(a summary)
|
work
|
text
|
| 1.
concrete; |
1.
a methodological field; 2. Subverting old classification |
| 3.
closes itself on a signified |
3.
sign; 4. Plural; intertextual (77); |
- caught up in a
process of filiation
- object
of consumption
|
- without the father's
signature
- 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 |
- "The
Myth Today": 1. Myth is a type of speech; 2. Study of myth is both formal
and ideological; 3. second-order signification An Outline
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:
- producer
of myth
- decoder
of myth
- 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.
-
Barthes and Foucault (An Outline by
Allison Lin)
[top]
(external) Literary
Criticism Databank: Structuralism and Semiotics
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