Fifty-four Journalistic Articles
 The articles are constituted as opportunistic improvisations that provide with a panorama of events in France of 1950s.
 The articles focus on various manifestations of mass culture to challenge “innocence” and “naturalness” of cultural events.
 What Barthes is doing: stop taking things for granted, uncover the secondary meanings and connotations.
Myths Today: Le Mythe aujourd ‘hui’
 The essay is a retrospectively theoretical conspectus that provides a methodological tract for the fifty-four articles.

Myth is a type of speech
 Myth is a system of communication: it is defined by the way in which it utters messages.
 Myth is a form, a mode of signification: photo, cinema, or sports can be served as a support to mythical speech.
 Myth has a historical foundation: it is the speech chosen by history.
Myth is a second-order semiological system
 Mythology is one fragment of semiology: it studies significations apart from their content.
 Mythology is endowed with significance; it is a science dealing with
“value”.

. . . We are dealing with, in any semiological system, not with two, but with three different terms.”—signifier, signified and sign
“A bunch of Roses”
Language 1.The form of
Rose Rose
Myth
3. The Sign: Rose
I. A bunch of roses II. Passion
III. A bunch of “passionified roses”

Language 1. Signifier 2. Signified
Myth
3. Sign
I. Signifier
III. Sign
II. Signified
Two Semiological Systems <e.g “ A bunch of roses
”>
I.
A Linguistic System (language-object)
Sign  the associative total of Signifier and Signified
II.
Myth (metalanguage): a second language
Sign
 a signifier in the second system

Signifier : meaning and form
 meaning : a total of linguistic signs that postulate a kind of knowledge, a comparative order of ideas and memory.
 form : meaning leaves its contingency; it empties itself and only the letter remains.
 meaning to form : the form does not suppress meaning but impoverishes it; meaning is put at a distance, lost its value.
Signified : concept
 Concept offers knowledge for impoverished meaning .
 It is a formless, unstable and nebulous condensation that can spread over a large expanse of signifiers .

Sign : signification
 The term is the association of the first two, the correlation of mythical concept and mythical form.
 In signification, the function of myth is to distort, not to make disappear with two manifestations:
I. form: a literal immediate presence that can appear only through a given substructure.
II. concept: a kind of nebula, the condensation of certain knowledge.
 The correlation of the two is a relation of deformation.
 concept distorts the full meaning, literally deforms it but does not abolish it. <e.g. “
The grammatical example
”>

quia ego nominor leo: “because my name is lion”
 In a purely linguistic system, the clause finds a fullness of history: I am an animal, I live in certain country. . .
 In a system of myth, the richness is receded at a distance:
“my name is lion”  “I am a grammatical example”, a presence of a certain agreement of the predicate.
 The form of lion remains; the naming of lion is deprived of “ memory ,” not of “ existence ,” the meaning is distorted by concept.

The mythical signifier reproduces alibi
 meaning presents the from; from outdistances the meaning
 form empty but present; meaning absent but full
Myth is a froze language
 The use of signification confers like a notified look behind fact.
 The fact paralyses the intention, makes it innocent and frozen.
 mythical speech appears as a notification/ a statement of fact
Myth is type of speech defined by its intention


Myth is always in part motivated and unavoidably contains
Myth plays on the analogy between form/ meaning.
 there is no myth without motivated form.
analogy