Embodying a transformation from structuralism to poststructuralism, Roland Barthes, though initially characterised by a Marxist perspective, extended

Literary Theory and Criticism

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2021-05-22 20:00:14

Embodying a transformation from structuralism to poststructuralism, Roland Barthes, though initially characterised by a Marxist perspective, extended structural analysis and semiology to broad cultural phenomena, and promulgated and popularised the Poststructuralist notions of “the death of the author”, of the text as a site of freeplay, and the difference between the “work” and the “text” and the “readerly” and “writerly” text.

Barthes’ Writing Degree Zero examines the development of literary forms and analyses the literary movements represented by Flaubert and Mallarme. He points out that these writers attempt to divorce language from its sociality, to promote the creation of form as an end in itself, and to create “natural” modes of writing. In opposition to this, Barthes argues that language is inextricably bound to social institutions and norms.

Mythologies expressed Barthes’ resentment of the bourgeois attempts to naturalise or universalise their values and agenda, so that such values become the norm, and the rest become aberration and abnormality. Here, Barthes undertook an ideological critique of products of mass bourgeoisie culture. He introduced the concept of myth (which serves the purpose of such mystification), while he also cautions that there are no eternal myths, for myths are created by the bourgeoisie in every society. Barthes’ concept of myth has a tridimensional pattern where the signified of the first order signification becomes the signifier of the second order signification, through the operation of differance. Therefore myth consists of two semiological systems, where the object of the first is language and the second is myth or the metalanguage, which has multilayered signification, which Barthes illustrates with the example of the cover page of a Parisian magazine, where a young negro in French uniform salutes with his eyes uplifted, probably gazing at the French flag. Myth is a type of speech defined more by its intention than by its literal sense. Barthes explains that myth “essentially  aims at causing an immediate impression,” thereby encouraging the illusion and that myth is factual, while actually it is not. Thus naturalises history and empties reality, it is “depoliticised speech”. Barthes equates this process of myth making with the creation of bourgeois ideology.

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