Book Report Mythologies by Roland Barthes Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Book Report Mythologies by Roland Barthes - Essay ExampleHe says that All the toys one commonly sees are fundamentally a microcosm of the adult field (Barthes, 1972, p.53), and that for instance, a girls doll is meant to...condition her to her future role as mother (Barthes, 1972, p.53). If we apply this to videogames, we can immediately see that semiotics, especially as applied to ideology, might withdraw more light on the role that games play in our globalised society. According to Barthes, cut toys are an illustration of the belief that children are a miniature rebuke of adults -toys offer too much direction - they do not allow children to engage in their own imaginative play. By providing children with artificial materials and toys are we, in turn, providing them with an artificial view of the worldMythologies is a text which is not one but plural. It contains fifty-four (only twenty-eight in the Annette Laverss English translation) short journalistic articles on a variety of subjects. These texts were written between 1954 and 1956 for the left-wing magazine Les Lettres nouvelles and really clearly belong to Barthess priode journalistique (Calvet 1973 p.37). They all show a topicality, typical of good journalism. Because of their very topicality they provide the present-day(a) reader with a panorama of the events and trends that took place in the France of the 1950s. Although the texts are very much of and about their times, many still have an unsettling contemporary relevance to us today. The majority of the fifty-four texts focus on various manifestations of mass culture, la culture de masse films, advertizing, newspapers and magazines, photographs, elevator cars, childrens toys, popular pastimes and the like. Mythologies, however, includes an important theoretical look for entitled Le Mythe aujourdhui (Barthes 1970 pp.193-247). In Le Mythe aujourdhui, Barthes is at the barbers and is handed a copy of the Paris-Match. As he sees a photograph of a black pass saluting the French flag, the arrangement of coloured dots on a white background, he understood it to be embedded with a signifier and a signified, constituting the idea of French imperialism and that Frances empire treats all its subjects equally. It is a retrospectively imposed where its position after the journalistic articles is also significant. This expressed not simply the chronological order in which they were written, but also to make more explicit some of the concerns that underpin the fifty-four essays. There is, then, a certain amount of continuity between the devil parts of Mythologies. If there is a certain amount of thematic continuity between the two parts of Mythologies then it is here, where Barthes claimed that he wanted to challenge the innocence and naturalness of cultural texts and practices. Although objects, gestures and practices have a certain utilitarian function, they are not resistant to the imposition of meaning. There is no such thing, to take but one example, as a car which is a purely functional object devoid of connotations and resistant to the imposition of meaning. A BMW and a Citron 2CV share the same functional utility, they do essentially the same job but connote different things about their owners thrusting,