The problem of the mythical, however, persists as a symptom of a more profound crisis of society equally stuck to the practice of the mythologist. An abridged English translation of Mythologies (1957), one of Barthess most famous books, has been available. Yet, after close analysis, it can be demonstrated that, for Barthes, the mythologist has to be susceptible to the magical as well, if, as a critic, he wishes to obtain a total view of reality. I say essentially because society has changed to where it is not dictated, but for those who believe in the system, we live in the myth. Both myth and magic appear to be discursive weapons by which both camps attack each other. Here’s the thing- 1957 or 2016, it doesn’t matter, the struggle for women to balance work and home is still essentially the same. Critics like Barthes, however, are depicted by the petty bourgeois media as magicians pontificating about the world with discourses (inspired by, for example, psychoanalysis) that can hardly be understood by ordinary people. At first sight, the socio-critical concept of ‘myth’ in the guise of ‘dream’ appears to be used to challenge the ruling ideology by contesting its presumed rational nature. In order to develop his mythological criticism, Barthes relies on psychoanalysis, specifically, on Freud’s theory of dreams. He wrote his famous ‘mythologies’ to criticize this misrepresentation of the world. Barthes claims that society is permeated by petty bourgeois myths representing phenomena which are basically historical as natural and universal.

Though Semiotics and Sernioiogy have been used interchangeably to refer to the same study, there are certain basic basic differences in the way both CS Peirce and Saussure perceived, defined and classified the “sign”.In Roland Barthes’s Mythologies (1957), psychoanalysis is deployed as a critical method to analyze the use of signs in contemporary mass culture in France.

Thus Semiotics can be considered one of the larger structures of structuralism itself, as Saussure himself referred to it as a “larger imaginative province for the study of language”. Introduced by Charles Sanders Peirce as Semiotics, in the end of the 19th century, and as Semiology by Saussure in his Course in General Liiiguistics (1916), this science deals with the study of signs that are not just confined to the literary realm, but also to the non-literary, which spans across an entire gamut of human activities, such as rituals, customs, dress code and so on, and which convey common meanings to the members of a particular culture. Many of the revolutionary theories of the twentieth century, such as Structuralism and Poststructuralism, Structural Anthropology (Levi-Strauss), Psychoanalysis (Lacan), Cultural Studies (Barthes) and the theories of Foucault have drawn their ideas from Semiotics.

A highly influential branch of study, Semiotics or the study of signs, can be considered the foundation for literary theory.

Mythologies 1957