Roland Barthes

Annette Lavers

"As the launcher of the whole science of ""semiotics"" - the study of the meanings latent in the signs and objects we come across dally in the modem media-saturated worid - this book attempts to demystify the roies and values inherent in such diverse commonplace items as wrestling, Citroen DS, steak and chips. Greta Garbo's face and household detorgents via a series of essays. The essays themselves became cultural icons, and the book became a cult object It is now studled on many courses in hogher education as an emblematic text of post-war..."

Mythologies

"[Mythologies] illustrates the beautiful generosity of Barthes's progressive interest in the meaning (his word is signification) of practically everything around him, not only the books and paintings of high art, but also the slogans, trivia, toys, food, and popular rituals (cruises, striptease, eating, wrestling matches) of contemporary life . . . For Barthes, words and objects have in common the organized capacity to say something; at the same time, since they are signs, words and objects have the bad faith always to appear natural to their consumer, as if what they say is eternal, true, necessary, instead of arbitrary, made, contingent. Mythologies finds Barthes revealing the fashioned systems of ideas that make it possible, for example, for 'Einstein's brain' to stand for, be the myth of, 'a genius so lacking in magic that one speaks about his thought as a functional labor analogous to the mechanical making of sausages.' Each of the little essays in this book wrenches a definition out of a common but constructed object, making the object speak its hidden, but ever-so-present, reservoir of manufactured sense."--Edward W. Said

Oscar Kömpel

I don't know how much I truly ~understood~ on an initial read but it was fascinating and dense in the best way

aly eleanor

Prashanth Srivatsa

Often abstruse, but Barthes takes on everyday objects with amazing zeal, churning out a hundred and fifty pages of eloquent prose to really show us what the world is up to. There is a lot in the head of the French genius, and most of it comes out as stray thoughts of someone whose time passed when there were no blogs, but he never fails to grapple with reality and make us do away with delusions and illusions of what we see around us. Again, just one word. Fascinating.

A series of essays in which Barthes seeks to tear away masks and demystify the signs, signals, gestures and messages through which western society sustains, sells, identifies and yet obscures itself.

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Sebastian Leck

Tom Gregson

jack

iamazoo

Will Vunderink

Vladimir

" Le propre des Mythologies, c'est de prendre systématiquement en bloc une sorte de monstre que j'ai appelé la "petite-bourgeoisie" (quitte à en faire un mythe) et de taper inlassablement sur ce bloc ".

Mythologies

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