I. Major Work

1. first stage: Marxist-- Writing Degree Zero (1953)  to Mythologies (1957)
2. second stage: Structuralist -- Mythologies -- The Fashion Design  (The Death of the Author in 1967, also the year of publication of Writing and Difference)
3. third stage: post-structuralist -- S/Z
4. fourth stage: physical experience of reading, autobiography, A Lover's Discourse, on photography.

• The Death of the Author (A summary by Ann Yang)
• The Text is a "methodological field," a structured but de-centered field of signs, rather then a portion of the space of books, an entity, which is the work.   "From Work to Text" (a summary)

 

work	text
1. concrete;	1. a methodological field; 2. Subverting old classification
3. closes itself on a signified	3. sign; 4. Plural; intertextual (77);
caught up in a process of filiation  object of consumption	without the father's signature process of meaning; splitting of signs; play; jouissance

 
• The distinction between the writerly (writable) text and readerly (readable) text; pleasure of reading (enjoyable, nameable) and jouissance (revolutionary, shocking, cannot be articulated)

 

the writerly (writable) text = text de jouissance

readerly (readable) text =  text de plaisir

• "The Myth Today": 1. Myth is a type of speech; 2. Study of myth is both formal and ideological;  3. second-order signification  An Outline

• "the form does not suppress the meaning, it only impoverishes it, it puts it at a distance, it holds it at one's disposal.

  " (118)
• "myth hides nothing; its function is to distort." (123)
• "Its [The mythical signifier] form is empty but present, its meaning absent but full." (124)
• 3 kinds of reading:
1. producer of myth
2. decoder of myth
3. consumer of myth

 
3. Barthes in Mythologies
-- discuss the contradictory surface and latent meanings in cultural incidences;
-- disclose the inherent meanings of the ritual of wrestle (which is not a sport but a spectacle); -- critiques the ideologies underly popular culture, such as colonialism, sexism (gender stereotypes such as Garbo and Audrey Hepburn), etc.

 
 
1. Barthes and Foucault (An Outline by Allison Lin)