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Disciplines > Storytelling > Storytelling articles > Barthes' Five Codes
Hermeneutic | Proairetic | Semantic | Symbolic | Cultural | See also
Linguist Roland Barthes described Five Codes which are woven into any narrative.
The purpose of the author in this is typically to keep the audience guessing, arresting the
enigma, until the final scenes when all is revealed and all loose ends are tied off
and closure is achieved.
"...dependent on ... two sequential codes: the revelation of truth and the
coordination of the actions represented: there is the same constraint in the gradual
order of melody and in the equally gradual order of the narrative sequence."
See also
Critical Theory, Linguistics, Death of the author
Hermeneutic Code
Disciplines > Storytelling > Story Devices > Hermeneutic Code
Description | Example | Discussion | See also
Description
A Hermeneutic Code is something that is unexplained and which creates an unanswered
question, often appearing at the beginning of the story, thus creating a tension that engages
the audience.
Hermeneutic codes are at the root of all mysteries.
A coherent story will eventually explain and hence tie up all these loose ends.
Example
A person vanishes into thin air for no apparent reason.
See also
Twist ending, The need to predict
Proairetic Code
Disciplines > Storytelling > Story devices > Proairetic Codes
Description | Example | Discussion | See also
Description
A Proairetic Code is a plot action that does not directly raise particular questions -- it is
simply an action that is caused by a previous event and which leads to other events. It is not
inherently mysterious.
Example
A person walks down the street.
Discussion
Where the proairetic code creates tension in a story is in the anticipation it causes with
regard to what might happen next.
When we read stories we may try to read the mind of the author and hence wonder why
what is happening as it is. This effect can be used by the author to lead the reader astray and
hence create further tension.
This term was introduced by Roland Barthes to distinguish it from the Hermeneutic Code.
See also
Hermeneutic Code, The Need to Predict
Linguistics
Explanations > Social Research > Philosophies of Social Research > Linguistics
Principle | Discussion | See also
Principle
Linguistics approaches to reality show how meaning is contained in words and their use.
Discussion
Language is our way of marking things such that we can think about them and
communicate about them. This is a process of meaning-making. Further, when we re-use
the words, that first meaning is blended with the situational context to create variants upon
the original meaning.
When a word does not exist then talking and even thinking about an item may be very
difficult. In the following languages, Bassa and Shona would have great difficulty
considering the difference between red and orange.
English
red orange yellow green blue purple
Shona
cipsuka cicena citerna cipsuka
Bassa
ziza hui
See also
Language techniques
Roland Barthes and the Coding of Discourse
The Codes
Roland Barthess S/Z, which purports to be an exhaustive structuralist reading of Balzacs
Short story Sarrasine, in fact is a classic of what today we understand by post-
structuralism, in its relentless exposure of the structuration of the structures of the realist
narrative. The following is an outline of the so called five codes he uses to analyse the
different dimensions of realism (the five codes may be in analogy with the five senses
through which the world comes naturally to our perception thus mocking the naturalist
pretensions of the highly structured realist narrative). Further discussion of Barthes, if you
are interested, is welcome.
1. Proairetic code (the voice of empirics): The code of actions. Any action initiated must be
completed. The cumulative actions constitute the plot events of the text.
3. Connotative [or Semic] code (the voice of the person): The accumulation of
connotations. Semes, sequential thoughts, traits and actions constitute character. The proper
noun surrounded by connotations.
4. Cultural or referential code (the voice of science [or knowledge]): Though all codes are
cultural we reserve this designation for the storehouse of knowledge we use in interpreting
everyday experience.
5. Symbolic code (voice of the symbol): Binary oppositions or themes. The inscription into
the text of the antithesis central to the organization of the cultural code.
6. Snare and truth: A statement which might be taken two different ways.
7. Suspended answers.
8. Partial answers.
10. Disclosure: a discussion or uttering of the irreversible word, closure, the end of
signification.
Barthes own descriptions from S/Z may help to illuminate what hes looking for:
Hermeneutic code: all those units whose function it is to articulate in various ways a
question, its response, and the variety of chance events which can either formulate the
question or delay its answer; or even, constitute an enigma and lead to its solution (17).
Semic code: the unit of the signifier which creates or suggests connotation (17).
Reference code: the knowledge or wisdom to which the text continually refers (18);
references to a science or a body of knowledge (20). (Barthes also calls this the cultural
code.)
It should be apparent why one of the most common responses to these five codes is to
paraphrase them in a way that is more concrete and precise. A better grasp of the codes can
be established by examining Barthes applications and further discussions of them, however.
One example of Barthes designation of each code will suffice to illustrate this final point:
Hermeneutic code: The title raises a question: What is Sarrasine? A noun? A name? A
thing? A man? A woman? (17).
Semic code: The title has an additional connotation, that of femininity, which will be
obvious to any French-speaking person, since that language automatically takes the final e
as a specifically feminine linguistic property, particularly in the case of a proper name whose
masculine form (Sarrazin) exists in French onomastics (17).
Symbolic code: Barthes quotes the lines recounting the engrossment of the narrators
companion in the painting of Adonis when she learns the model for it was a relative of Mme
de Lanty. The narrator feels spurned: I had the pain of seeing her rapt in the contemplation of
this figure...Forgotten for a painting! This evokes the symbolic code, Barthes concludes:
Marriage of the castrato (here, the union of the young woman and the castrato is euphorized:
we know that the symbolic configuration is not subject to a diegetic development: what has
exploded catastrophically can return peacefully united) (78).
Reference code: Sarrasine discovers the truth about Zambinella after referring to him as a
she while talking with the Roman Prince Chigi. Where are you from?, the Prince asks
him. Has there ever been a woman on the Roman stage? And dont you know about the
creatures who sing female roles in the Papal States? This evokes the reference code, Barthes
asserts: History of music in the Papal States (184).
A lot of useful stuff on codes in semiotics, and on Barthes use of codes in particular, can be
found at the following websites:
Roland Barthes was a French theorist who studied a variety of fields. Perhaps his most
famous contribution to Media Studies was through his study of semiology. The following
five codes can be very useful in the process of textual analysis. While you will be making
far more use of some than others (action codes and enigma codes for example), learning to
apply all five will prepare you for anything that may come up in the exam.
'Open' - which is when lots of or all of the narrative codes are used making the
story complicated. For example the film 'Inception' is an open media text as it
has embedded complicated story lines.
'Closed' - which is when a single narrative code is used, therefore the story is
simple. For example the story 'Goldilocks' is a closed media text as the story is
simple and there are no.
Hermeneutic/Enigma Code
The hermeneutic code, less formally known as the enigma code, refers to the
mystery within a text, where clues are dropped but there is clear answers given to the
audience. Enigmas within the narrative make the audiences want to know more, but
unanswered enigmas tend to frustrate audiences as people like closed endings.
Examples of the hermeneuic code in'Frozen' are:
In an opening title sequence, the proairetic code helps to set the genre as the
audience can predict or expect a certain sequence from what they have been shown,
hinting at a certain genre due to the conventions of different genres.
Semantic Code
The semantic code refers to parts within the text that suggest and refer to additional
meanings, where the audience makes suggestions. Elements of the semantic code
are called Semes,which have a connotative function in the text. They have an extra
layer of meaning in addition to its literal meaning.
Examples of the semantic code in 'Frozen' are:
Elsa runs away suggesting that she feels different and alone.
Hans wants a princess wife suggesting that he wants to raise his status.
In an opening sequence, the semantic code can help to set the genre of the film as
when the audience watch the opening sequence they can suggest what something
they've been shown means, giving them an idea of the genre.
Symbolic Code
The symbolic code is about symbolism within the text which exercises opposites to
show contrast and create greater meaning, creating tension, drama and character
development.
Examples of the symbolic code in 'Frozen' are:
In an opening title sequence, the symbolic code does not really mean anything, or
come into play, as the the film needs to progress before the audience can know and
see character development and the contrast of opposites.
Referential Code
The referential code refers to anything in a media text which refer to an external body
of knowledge such as; scientific, historical, cultural knowledge. The referential code
makes the audience understand or expect stories from what we already know.
Examples of the referential code in 'Frozen' are:
In the book 'The Ice Queen', - which 'Frozen' is based on - Elsa is the
villain so in the film 'Frozen', we expect Elsa is the villain, but then she
becomes the hero.
In Disney princess films, the princesses marry the first man they see so
in 'Frozen', we expect it when Anna wants to marry Hans.
From royalty, if the King or Queen die, there is a coronation where the oldest
child will become the new King or Queen so in 'Frozen', when the King and
Queen die, we expect it when there is a coronation and Elsa - the eldest
sibling - becomes Queen.
In an opening title sequence, the referential code can help set the genre as if the
audience know what the conventions of a certain genre are, they can predict the
genre of the film they are watching due to the conventions shown on the film they are
watching.
Cherbourg, France
Paris, France
School Structuralism
Semiotics
Post-structuralism
Literary theory
Narratology
Linguistics
Influences[show]
Influenced[show]
Signature
Roland Grard Barthes (/brt/;[3] French: [l bat]; 12 November 1915 26 March[4] 1980) was
a French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a
diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory
including structuralism, semiotics, social theory, design theory, anthropology and post-
structuralism.
Semiotics
General concepts
Sign
o (relation
o relational complex)
Code
Confabulation
Connotation / Denotation
Encoding / Decoding
Lexical
Modality
Representation
Salience
Semiosis
Semiosphere
Fields
Biosemiotics
Cognitive semiotics
Computational semiotics
Literary semiotics
Semiotics of culture
Methods
Commutation test
Paradigmatic analysis
Syntagmatic analysis
Semioticians
Mikhail Bakhtin
Roland Barthes
Marcel Danesi
John Deely
Umberto Eco
Gottlob Frege
Algirdas Julien Greimas
Flix Guattari
Louis Hjelmslev
Vyacheslav Ivanov
Roman Jakobson
Roberta Kevelson
Kalevi Kull
Juri Lotman
Charles W. Morris
Charles S. Peirce
Augusto Ponzio
Ferdinand de Saussure
Thomas Sebeok
Michael Silverstein
Eero Tarasti
Vladimir Toporov
Jakob von Uexkll
Related topics
CopenhagenTartu school
TartuMoscow Semiotic School
Post-structuralism
Structuralism
Postmodernity
v
t
e
Contents
[hide]
1Life
2Writings and ideas
o 2.1Early thought
o 2.2Semiotics and myth
o 2.3Structuralism and its limits
o 2.4Transition
o 2.5Textuality and S/Z
o 2.6Neutral and novelistic writing
o 2.7Photography and Henriette Barthes
o 2.8Posthumous publications
3Influence
4Key terms
o 4.1Readerly text
o 4.2Writerly text
o 4.3The Author and the scriptor
5Criticism
6In popular culture
7Bibliography
8References
9Further reading
10External links
Life[edit]
Roland Barthes was born on 12 November 1915 in the town of Cherbourg in Normandy. His
father, naval officer Louis Barthes, was killed in a battle during World War I in the North
Seabefore Barthes' first birthday. His mother, Henriette Barthes, and his aunt and grandmother
raised him in the village of Urt and the city of Bayonne. When Barthes was eleven, his family
moved to Paris, though his attachment to his provincial roots would remain strong throughout his
life.
Barthes showed great promise as a student and spent the period from 1935 to 1939 at
the Sorbonne, where he earned a license in classical letters. He was plagued by ill health
throughout this period, suffering from tuberculosis, which often had to be treated in the isolation
of sanatoria.[5]His repeated physical breakdowns disrupted his academic career, affecting his
studies and his ability to take qualifying examinations. They also exempted him from military
service during World War II. While being kept out of the major French universities meant that he
had to travel a great deal for teaching positions, Barthes later professed an intentional avoidance
of major degree-awarding universities, and did so throughout his career.[6][clarification needed]
His life from 1939 to 1948 was largely spent obtaining a licence in grammar and philology,
publishing his first papers, taking part in a medical study, and continuing to struggle with his
health. He received a diplme d'tudes suprieures (fr) (roughly equivalent to an MA thesis) from
the University of Paris in 1941 for his work in Greek tragedy.[7] In 1948, he returned to purely
academic work, gaining numerous short-term positions at institutes in France, Romania,
and Egypt. During this time, he contributed to the leftist Parisian paper Combat, out of which grew
his first full-length work, Writing Degree Zero (1953). In 1952, Barthes settled at the Centre
National de la Recherche Scientifique, where he studied lexicology and sociology. During his
seven-year period there, he began to write a popular series of bi-monthly essays for the
magazine Les Lettres Nouvelles, in which he dismantled myths of popular culture (gathered in
the Mythologies collection that was published in 1957). Consisting of fifty-four short essays,
mostly written between 19541956, Mythologies were acute reflections of French popular culture
ranging from an analysis on soap detergents to a dissection of popular wrestling.[8] Knowing little
English, Barthes taught at Middlebury College in 1957 and befriended the future English
translator of much of his work, Richard Howard, that summer in New York City.[9]
Barthes spent the early 1960s exploring the fields of semiology and structuralism, chairing
various faculty positions around France, and continuing to produce more full-length studies. Many
of his works challenged traditional academic views of literary criticism and of renowned figures of
literature. His unorthodox thinking led to a conflict with a well-known Sorbonne professor of
literature, Raymond Picard, who attacked the French New Criticism (a label that he inaccurately
applied to Barthes) for its obscurity and lack of respect towards France's literary roots. Barthes'
rebuttal in Criticism and Truth (1966) accused the old, bourgeois criticism of a lack of concern
with the finer points of language and of selective ignorance towards challenging theories, such
as Marxism.
By the late 1960s, Barthes had established a reputation for himself. He traveled to
the US and Japan, delivering a presentation at Johns Hopkins University. During this time, he
wrote his best-known work, the 1967 essay "The Death of the Author," which, in light of the
growing influence of Jacques Derrida's deconstruction, would prove to be a transitional piece in
its investigation of the logical ends of structuralistthought. Barthes continued to contribute
with Philippe Sollers to the avant-garde literary magazine Tel Quel, which was developing similar
kinds of theoretical inquiry to that pursued in Barthes' writings. In 1970, Barthes produced what
many[who?] consider to be his most prodigious work, the dense, critical reading
of Balzac's Sarrasine entitled S/Z. Throughout the 1970s, Barthes continued to develop his
literary criticism; he developed new ideals of textuality and novelistic neutrality. In 1971, he
served as visiting professor at the University of Geneva.
In 1975 he wrote an autobiography titled Roland Barthes and in 1977 he was elected to the chair
of Smiologie Littraire at the Collge de France. In the same year, his mother, Henriette
Barthes, to whom he had been devoted, died, aged 85. They had lived together for 60 years. The
loss of the woman who had raised and cared for him was a serious blow to Barthes. His last
major work, Camera Lucida, is partly an essay about the nature of photography and partly a
meditation on photographs of his mother. The book contains many reproductions of photographs,
though none of them are of Henriette.
On 25 February 1980, Roland Barthes was knocked down by a laundry van while walking home
through the streets of Paris. One month later, on March 26,[10] he succumbed to the chest injuries
sustained in that accident.[11]
Influence[edit]
Roland Barthes's incisive criticism contributed to the development of theoretical schools such
as structuralism, semiotics, and post-structuralism. While his influence is mainly found in these
theoretical fields with which his work brought him into contact, it is also felt in every field
concerned with the representation of information and models of communication, including
computers, photography, music, and literature. One consequence of Barthes' breadth of focus is
that his legacy includes no following of thinkers dedicated to modeling themselves after him. The
fact that Barthes work was ever adapting and refuting notions of stability and constancy means
there is no canon of thought within his theory to model one's thoughts upon, and thus no
"Barthesism".
Key terms[edit]
Readerly and writerly are terms Barthes employs both to delineate one type of literature from
another and to implicitly interrogate ways of reading, like positive or negative habits the modern
reader brings into one's experience with the text itself. These terms are most explicitly fleshed out
in S/Z, while the essay "From Work to Text", from ImageMusicText (1977) provides an
analogous parallel look at the active and passive, postmodern and modern, ways of interacting
with a text.
Readerly text[edit]
A text that makes no requirement of the reader to "write" or "produce" their own meanings. The
reader may passively locate "ready-made" meaning. Barthes writes that these sorts of texts are
"controlled by the principle of non-contradiction" (156), that is, they do not disturb the "common
sense," or "Doxa," of the surrounding culture. The "readerly texts," moreover, "are products [that]
make up the enormous mass of our literature" (5). Within this category, there is a spectrum of
"replete literature," which comprises "any classic (readerly) texts" that work "like a cupboard
where meanings are shelved, stacked, [and] safeguarded" (200).[16]
Writerly text[edit]
A text that aspires to the proper goal of literature and criticism: "... to make the reader no longer a
consumer but a producer of the text" (4). Writerly texts and ways of reading constitute, in short,
an active rather than passive way of interacting with a culture and its texts. A culture and its texts,
Barthes writes, should never be accepted in their given forms and traditions. As opposed to the
"readerly texts" as "product," the "writerly text is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the
world is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system (Ideology, Genus,
Criticism) which reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of
languages" (5). Thus reading becomes for Barthes "not a parasitical act, the reactive complement
of a writing", but rather a "form of work" (10).
The Author and the scriptor[edit]
Author and scriptor are terms Barthes uses to describe different ways of thinking about the
creators of texts. "The author" is our traditional concept of the lone genius creating a work of
literature or other piece of writing by the powers of his/her original imagination. For Barthes, such
a figure is no longer viable. The insights offered by an array of modern thought, including the
insights of Surrealism, have rendered the term obsolete. In place of the author, the modern world
presents us with a figure Barthes calls the "scriptor," whose only power is to combine pre-existing
texts in new ways. Barthes believes that all writing draws on previous texts, norms, and
conventions, and that these are the things to which we must turn to understand a text. As a way
of asserting the relative unimportance of the writer's biography compared to these textual and
generic conventions, Barthes says that the scriptor has no past, but is born with the text. He also
argues that, in the absence of the idea of an "author-God" to control the meaning of a work,
interpretive horizons are opened up considerably for the active reader. As Barthes puts it, "the
death of the author is the birth of the reader."[17]
Criticism[edit]
In 1964, Barthes wrote "The Last Happy Writer" ("Le dernier des crivains heureux" in Essais
critiques), the title of which refers to Voltaire. In the essay he commented on the problems of the
modern thinker after discovering the relativism in thought and philosophy, discrediting previous
philosophers who avoided this difficulty. Disagreeing roundly with Barthes' description of Voltaire,
Daniel Gordon, the translator and editor of Candide (The Bedford Series in History and Culture),
wrote that "never has one brilliant writer so thoroughly misunderstood another."[citation needed]
The sinologist Simon Leys, in a review of Barthes' diary of a trip to China during the Cultural
Revolution, disparages Barthes for his seeming indifference to the situation of the Chinese
people, and says that Barthes "has contrivedamazinglyto bestow an entirely new dignity
upon the age-old activity, so long unjustly disparaged, of saying nothing at great length."[18]
In popular culture[edit]
Barthes' A Lover's Discourse: Fragments was the inspiration for the name of 1980s new
wave duo The Lover Speaks.
Jeffrey Eugenides's The Marriage Plot draws out excerpts from Barthes' A Lover's Discourse:
Fragments as a way to depict the unique intricacies of love that one of the main characters,
Madeleine Hanna, experiences throughout the novel.[19]
In the film Birdman (2014) by Alejandro Gonzlez Irritu, a journalist quotes to the protagonist
Riggan Thompson an extract from Mythologies: "The cultural work done in the past by gods and
epic sagas is now done by laundry-detergent commercials and comic-strip characters".[20]
In the film The Truth About Cats & Dogs (1996) by Michael Lehmann, Brian is reading an extract
from Camera Lucida over the phone to a woman whom he thinks to be beautiful but who is her
more intellectual and less physically desirable friend.[21]
In the film Elegy, based on Philip Roth's novel The Dying Animal, the character of Consuela
(played by Penelope Cruz) is first depicted in the film carrying a copy of Barthes' The Pleasure of
the Text on the campus of the university where she is a student.[22]
Laurent Binet's novel The 7th Function of Language is based on the premise that Barthes was
not merely accidentally hit by a van but that he was instead murdered, as part of a conspiracy to
acquire a document known as the "Seventh Function of Language".[23]
Bibliography[edit]
Works
References[edit]
1. Jump up^ Roland Barthes, "Introduction l'analyse structurale
des rcits", Communications, 8(1), 1966, pp. 127, translated as
"Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives", in: Roland
Barthes, ImageMusicText, essays selected and translated by
Stephen Heath, New York 1977, pp. 79124.
2. Jump up^ Rda Bensmaa, The Barthes Effect: The Essay as
Reflective Text, University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p. 112 n. 74:
"On all these pages [of Le plaisir du texte], Barthes refers directly
to Nietzsche whom he quotes, mentions, or "translates" freely."
3. Jump up^ "Barthes". Random House Webster's Unabridged
Dictionary.
4. Jump up^ Roland A. Champagne, Literary History in the Wake of
Roland Barthes: Re-Defining the Myths of Reading, Summa
Publications, Inc., 1984, p. vii.
5. Jump up^ Ben Rogers (8 January 1995). "ROLAND BARTHES: A
Biography by Louis-Jean Calvet". The Independent.
6. Jump up^ "Roland Barthes - Roland Barthes Biography - Poem
Hunter". www.poemhunter.com. Retrieved 2017-06-29.
7. Jump up^ Alan D. Schrift, Twentieth-Century French Philosophy:
Key Themes and Thinkers, John Wiley & Sons, Feb 4, 2009, p. 94.
8. ^ Jump up to:a b Huppatz, D.J. (2011). "Roland Barthes,
Mythologies". Design and Culture. 3 (1).
9. Jump up^ Richard Howard. "Remembering Roland Barthes," The
Nation(November 20, 1982): "Mutual friends brought us together in
1957. He came to my door in the summer of that year,
disconcerted by his classes at Middlebury (teaching students
unaccustomed to a visitor with no English to speak of) and bearing,
by way of introduction, a fresh-printed copy of Mythologies.
(Michelet and Writing Degree Zerohad already been published in
France, but he was not yet known in Americanot even in most
French departments. Middlebury was enterprising.)" Reprinted
in Signs in Culture: Roland Barthes Today, edited by Steven Ungar
and Betty R. McGraw, University of Iowa Press, 1989, p. 32
(ISBN 0-877-45245-8).
10. Jump up^ "Le plaisir des sens". Le Monde.fr (in French).
Retrieved 2016-10-30.
11. Jump up^ J. Y. Smith (27 March 1980). "Roland Barthes, French
Writer, dies at 64". The Washington Post.
12. Jump up^ Jay Clayton, Eric Rothstein, Influence and
Intertextuality in Literary History, University of Wisconsin Press,
1991, p. 156.
13. Jump up^ Barthes, Roland (1974). S/V. New York: Blackwell
Publishing. p. 13. ISBN 0631176071.
14. Jump up^ Jonathan Culler, Barthes: A Very Short Introduction,
Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1983, p. 110
15. Jump up^ Dora Zhang (23 June 2012). "The Sideways Gaze:
Roland Barthes's Travels in China". Los Angeles Review of Books.
16. Jump up^ Barthes, Roland. S/Z: An Essay. Trans. Richard Miller.
New York: Hill and Wang, 1974.
17. Jump up^ Barthes, Roland. ImageMusicText. Essays
selected and translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Noonday,
1977.
18. Jump up^ Leys, Simon The Hall of Uselessness: Collected
Essays, New York, New York Review Books, 2013.
19. Jump up^ "The Euphoria of Influence: Jeffrey Eugenides's The
Marriage Plot". Publicbooks.org. 2011-11-10. Retrieved 2012-12-
29.
20. Jump up^ "7 Secrets of the 'Birdman' Labyrinth". 10 October 2014.
21. Jump up^ "CTheory.net". www.ctheory.net.
22. Jump up^ Manohla Dargis, "Extracurricular Lessons for Student
and Teacher," review of Elegy, New York Times, August 8, 2008,
accessed on 12-9-2015: Of the character of Consuela, Dargis
writes, "She was his student and ripe for the plucking, especially in
the film, where she enters clutching Roland Barthes's "Pleasure of
the Text" to her lush bosom."
23. Jump up^ Laurent,, Binet,. The 7th function of language. Taylor,
Sam, 1970-. London,
England. ISBN 9781910701591. OCLC 956750580.
24. ^ Jump up to:a b Michael Wood (19 November 2009). "Presence of
Mind". London Review of Books.
Further reading[edit]
Allen, Graham. Roland Barthes. London: Routledge, 2003
Rda Bensmaa, The Barthes Effect: The Essay as Reflective
Text, trans. Pat Fedkiew, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1987.
Luca Cian, "A comparative analysis of print advertising applying
the two main plastic semiotics schools: Barthes' and
Greimas'", Semiotica 190: 5779, 2012.
Louis-Jean Calvet, Roland Barthes: A Biography, trans. Sarah
Wykes, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. ISBN 0-
253-34987-7 (This is a popular biography)
Jonathan Culler, Roland Barthes: A Very Short Introduction,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Paul de Man, "Roland Barthes and the Limits of Structuralism",
in Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism, ed. E.S. Burt, Kevin
Newmark, and Andrzej Warminski, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1993.
Jacques Derrida, "The Deaths of Roland Barthes," in Psyche:
Inventions of the Other, Vol. 1, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth
G. Rottenberg, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007.
D.A. Miller, Bringing Out Roland Barthes, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1992. (A highly personal collection of
fragments, aimed at both mourning Barthes and illuminating his
work in terms of a "gay writing position.")
Marie Gil, Roland Barthes: Au lieu de la vie, Paris: Flammarion,
2012. (The first major academic biography [562 p.])
Michael Moriarty, Roland Barthes, Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1991. (Explains various works of Roland Barthes)
Jean-Michel Rabate, ed., Writing the Image After Roland
Barthes, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.
Jean-Louis de Rambures, Interview with Roland Barthes in:
"Comment travaillent les crivains", Paris: Flammarion, 1978
Mireille Ribiere, Roland Barthes, Ulverston: Humanities E-Books,
2008.
Susan Sontag, "Remembering Barthes", in Under the Sign of
Saturn, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980.
Susan Sontag, "Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes", introduction
to Roland Barthes, A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag, New
York: Hill and Wang, 1982.
Steven Ungar. Roland Barthes: Professor of Desire. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1983. ISBN 9780803245518
George R. Wasserman. Roland Barthes. Boston: Twayne
Publishers, 1981.
External links[edit]
"Toys": Another excerpt from Mythologies
Barthes, Roland. Incidents. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1992. Free Online UC Press E-Books Collection
"Oscillation" by Roland Barthes
"Roland Barthes" "Comment vivre ensemble" ("How to live
together"), Lectures at the Collge de France, 1977 and "Le
Neutre" ("The Neutral"), Lectures at the Collge de France,
1978.
"Elements of Semiology" The first half of the book, from
Marxists.com
Roland Barthes by Philippe Sollers (in French)
Online Translation of The Discourse of History by Barthes
"Roland Barthes and Camera Lucida" by Ron Burnett
Roland Barthes and Juri Lotman special issue of Sign Systems
Studies] 44(3), 2016.
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Narrative
Structure
Narrative
Codes
NARRATIVE Roland Barthes developed a concept that every narrative is interwoven with five NARRA
What is codes that drive one to maintain interest in a story. The first two codes involve What
Narrative ? ways of creating suspense in narrative, the first by unanswered questions, the Narra
Development
of second by anticipation of an action's resolution. These two codes are essentially
Narrative connected to the temporal order of the narrative. Narrativ
Structu
The Hermeneutic Code Plot
Code
The hermeneutic code refers to plot elements of a story that are not explained. Temp
They exist as enigmas that the reader wishes to be resolved. A detective story, for Style
example, is a narrative that operates primarily by the hermeneutic code. A crime is
exposed or postulated and the rest of the narrative is devoted to answering The Nar
Corpo
questions raised by the initial event. Physic
Position
Narrat
The Proairetic Code Gramm
Positio
The proairetic code refers to plot events that imply further narrative action. For
example, a story character confronts an adversary and the reader wonders what the Literary
resolution of this action will be. Suspense is created by action rather than by a Devices
reader's wish to have mysteries explained. The final three codes are related to how Plot
the reader comprehends and interprets the narrative discourse. Chara
Settin
Contin
The Semic Code Rheto
A seme is a unit of meaning or a sign that express cultural stereotypes. These signs Charact
allow the author to describe characters, settings and events. The semic code Characte
Stock
focuses upon information that the narration provides in order to suggest abstract
concepts. Any element in a narrative can suggest a particular, often additional,
meaning by way of connotation through a correlation found in the narrative. The
semic code allows the text to 'show' instead of 'tell' by describing material things.
Together, these five codes function like a 'weaving of voices'. Barthes assigns to
the hermeneutic the Voice of Truth; to the proairetic code the voice of Empirics ;
to the semic the Voice of the Person; to the cultural the Voice of Science; and to
the symbolic the Voice of Symbol. According to Barthes, they allowing the reader
to see a work not just as a single narrative line but as a braiding of meanings that
give a story its complexity and richness.