Mythologies by Roland Barthes, ISBN-13: 978-0374521509

Mythologies by Roland Barthes, ISBN-13: 978-0374521509

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• Publisher: ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux (January 1, 1972)
• Language: ‎ English
• ‎160 pages
• ISBN-10: ‎ 0374521506
• ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0374521509

“[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

Table of Contents:

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE 7
PREFACE TO THE 1970 EDITION 9
PREFACE TO THE 1957 EDITION 11
MYTHOLOGIES
The World of Wrestling 15
The Romans in Films 26
The Writer on Holiday 29
The ‘Blue Blood’ Cruise 32
Blind and Dumb Criticism 34
Soap-powders and Detergents 36
The Poor and the Proletariat 39
Operation Margarine 41
Dominici, or the Triumph of Literature 43
The Iconography of the Abbé Pierre 47
Novels and Children 50
Toys 53
The Face of Garbo 56
Wine and Milk 58
Steak and Chips 62
The Nautilus and the Drunken Boat 65
The Brain of Einstein 68
The Jet-man 71
The Blue Guide 74
Ornamental Cookery 78
Neither-Nor Criticism 81
Striptease 84
The New Citroën 88
Photography and Electoral Appeal 91
The Lost Continent 94
Plastic 97
The Great Family of Man 100
The Lady of the Camellias 103
MYTH TODAY 109
Myth is a type of speech 109
Myth as a semiological system 111
The form and the concept 117
The signification 121
Reading and deciphering myth 127
Myth as stolen language 131
The bourgeoisie as a joint-stock company 137
Myth is depoliticized speech 142
Myth on the Left 145
Myth on the Right 148
Necessity and limits of mythology 156

Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was a French cultural and literary critic, whose clever and lyrical writings on semiotics made structuralism one of the leading movements of the twentieth century. Barthes had a cult following and published seventeen books, including Camera Lucida, Mythologies, and A Lover’s Discourse.

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