Mytologier : udvalgte essays om vor mytologiske hverdag (1957)

A sort of 1960's George Monbiot.

Barthes has some pretty interesting ideas; particularly, if one considers that these pieces were written in the 1950's. The language is a little forced and flowery but, that may be because I am reading this in translation. ( )

I wonder sometimes what it must be like to have been born before the simulacrum became a matter of fact, instead of 1985. What was it like to read Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, or Guy Debord before Ronald Reagan became president, Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor and the world was recreated in a manmade archipelago off the coast of Dubai? I have no idea. Roland Barthes is a tremendous writer but this book feels too precious, too quaint; serious conversations about the petite bourgeoise just feel so antiquated in the 21st century. I read it and think "How romantic!" "How French!" "That's nice!" My sympathies to the author, he had no way of knowing it would get this weird. ( )

Split into two sections, Barthes first examines a series of modern day (at time of writing) 'mythologies' - or socially-constructed 'fables' which blur symbols with our sense of 'what is'. The second section looks in more depth about how these mythologies are constructed generally, and how we might be able to study them more formally.

The first section was interesting, but I was definitely wanting more structure by the end of if. The second section needs some brain space to follow, but does ultimately make a great job of introducing such a structure.

Taken together, this is a really important book when considering how to assess the messages constructed and thrown around every day, from media to advertising to politics and elsewhere. Recommended. ( )

The first part of Mythologies is a collection of short individual pieces written by Barthes on the semiology - the underlying symbolism and meaning, of a selection of commonplace phenenomena of contemporary society in the 1950s.
What Barthes reads into things is frequently amusing and often enlightening. The reason that the book is entitled "Mythologies" is that he aims to expose the modern myths and demystify the symbolism of contemporary mass culture. Sometimes the targets of his pieces come off worse than others, and on the whole this provides an interesting sociological insight on things, and sometimes even scope for some philosophical reflection.
Whether the topic is Wrestling, Margarine, the latest Citroen model, French attitudes to Wine, Soap powders, Steak and Chips, or the Brain of Einstein, they are made consistently interesting topics and analysed intellegently and concisely. Many of the pieces just a couple of pages long.
The last third of the book ties up a number of themes and provides a more over-arching perspective on the modern mythologies and their semiological analysis. This is a lot denser than the individual pieces and often lacks their clarity, but does provide a vaguely useful theoretical framework for the understanding of semiology.
He presents mythology as a category of language that has a specific semiological meaning, that has a second layer of meaning compared to the first order meanings found in ordinary language and word. This expands the usage of the term mythology beyond its traditional meaning, but this makes sense in the way that the word is used currently in phrases such as "urban myths", which are analagous to the cultural myths presented in the first section - though they are not usually identified as such. Gives a new way of looking at popular culture. ( )

Myth today is a type of speech. It is everywhere. No one is completely immune to its effects.

Barthes is a Marxist to the core. I'm not. But this book--my intro to semiotics--is well worth the read. Language is powerful, mysterious, and downright scary. I didn't think I would enjoy a book on language. I was wrong.

Perhaps I believe the myth that if I post on Goodreads I must be some sort of intellectual. Reading books on semiotics does mean I'm smart, right?