Mythologies question

This is a good book to read for someone with limited background in philosophy and cultural anthropology. Barthes deals with the underlying meaning of many activities and events. Not all pieces in this collection are equally interesting and accessible. His essay on "Wrestling" is particularly good and widely anthologized. What Barthes shows us is how wrestling functions as a spectacle with symbolic values. Since wrestling is not standard competition,
in which the outcome is in doubt, there must be another reason for its popularity. Barthes sees wrestling less as sport and more as ritual: a wrestling match plays out in a predictable manner, with stock characters behaving in expected ways, and has an outcome that fulfills the audience's emotional needs in the same way that the Greek tragedy fulfilled the audience's need for catharsis.

Barthes' concept is ingenious: by understanding human habits and pastimes, we can gain insight into the human psyche and deepest motivations. The outside reflects the inside.

Barthes is one of the progenitors of semiotics as applied to popular culture. If you read this, I would recommend against the last part of the book where he talks about his mythology theory. It's confusing and hard to read, and worthless unless you're in a grad philosophy class.

Is there a semiotics for beginners, or something along those lines, that uses everyday language? Other similar topics are "visual culture" and "cultural studies", both of which use the same methods that are outlined in this book.

a book like this might be a good beginning. http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26...

The professional wrestling piece is good, as is the article on the Citroen DS car.

The idea behind this collection of magazine articles is simple: a highly ordered system of signs (codes) imbues our culture with a tacit coherence that, once discerned, enables you to see similar patterns elsewhere.

I would call this very much a "soft-core" exercise in semiotics (actually, semiology). Barthes utter reliance on Saussure, especially with regard to non-lexical signs, is his Achilles heel. Barthes never developed a sensitivity to the visual image — there are much better sources for you to consider from the point of view of graphic design.

I would start with Charles Peirce's discussion of sign types available in several chapters in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings; I would read "What is a Sign?" (1894) first. Here's an online version: http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/ep/ep2/e... and focus on the idea of the physical, 2D and 3D qualities of icons and especially indexes.

Wei wrote: "I'm a graphic designer, it's been recommended to me. I've gathered that this is critical book on semiotics and structuralism. But I have no theoretical background/study and barely know what those w..."

If I were you, I wouldn't read it before finding out more about structuralist semiotics.

Try reading "Semiotics: the basics" by Daniel Chandler. Totally rocked my world with his explanations of sintagmatic vs paradigmatic readings, binary oppositions and their inextricable link to construction of realities, and the whole section on codes.

It's essential reading, since he touches on the differences between Saussure vs Peirce, and also goes into Jakobson, Barthes, Levi-Strauss and others.

Not sure if you are still in need of help on this.

I don't keep up with Goodreads on regular basis and just saw this request.

The following may help.

In its simplest incarnation, semiology is the study of signs or how they "mean" something. This includes what folks typically think of as grammar, but really divides up into a number of disciplines having to do with what is usually called syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Linguistics deals with some of this. Rhetoric deals with some. Communication theory deals with some. Philosophy sometimes deals with some.

So semiology cuts across alot of traditional disciplines and any one of those disciplines tends to only look at one part and sometimes reduce the others.

Barthes focuses heavily on how signs and symbols get meaning from their cultural context. He tends to focus not on what regular folks call signs or symbols (e.g. words, or pictures) but on things and cultural phenomena and how they act as signs with a great deal of culturally endowed meaning.

In Mythologies, for example, he talks about things like wrestling or detergent and what they "mean" in our (or his French) culture. That meaning is much, much richer than their dictionary definition. More like an anthropological or sociological interpretation.

This is important for art criticism as it is pretty much the same kind of interpretation as seen in much of modern art criticism.

Barthes typically applies his approach to various other cultural phenomena, art criticism applies it to paintings sculpture and the like.

Some trouble in understanding the book is the jargon he uses about signs and signifieds, etc.

You might try some reference sources to understand the jargon of semiology. It is heavily based on a century old book by a linguistics fellow named De Saussure, but he is not easy to read either. Also, in general the books I have read on Semiology for Beginners (or dummies or etc.) and the same types of books on Barthes himself are universally horrible, so don't depend on them.

Last but not least, one of Barthes particular pet topics in semiology is how the explicit meaning of the sign is often hiding some other cultural, political propaganda meaning. This comes up in various of his writings.

This is a notion also in Jacques Derrida, but Derrida takes a more extreme view of it, saying that this contradiction between the explicit and implicit meanings intentionally renders the sign indeterminate (irresolvably ambiguous and therefore, in the traditional sense of univocal meaning, meaningless). But that is a little more than Barthes wants to say.

Hope this helps a bit. Good luck on the jargon. You can kind of ignore it for the first part of the book.