Mythologies by Roland Barthes

​Barthes uses the framework of Saussurian linguistics and goes further, adding another stage to analyze the myths of modern society. The final term (sign) in Saussure's structural linguistics becomes the first term (signifier) for Barthes analysis.

The last section of the book, "Myth Today," explains and expands on this methology for analyzing myths, although I thought that his analysis took a forced political dimension in the end, when he writes that myths depoliticize, dehistoricize, and naturalize bourgeois realities. The speech of the proletariat is always political and linked to action, to labour, and is the other end of the spectrum to mythological speech. 

I read in another source that he wrote his analyses after writing the monthly columns analyzing modern myths that make up the bulk of this book. Some of the modern myths he analyzed were quite apolitical, like his article "The World of Wrestling." Perhaps it was the political climate that gave this political bent to his analyses in the end.

As for his actual writings on contemporary mythologies, they were instructive, well-written, and provocative. Some of his references were outdated and outside my particular cultural sphere, but seeing how he methodologically dissects each modern reality to its component linguistic 'terms' was informative and gave me a new frame of reference in seeing the world.

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