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Beautiful reissue of this unique classic collection, featuring a newly translated essay not included in previous collections

About the Author

Roland Barthes was born in 1915 and studied French literature and classics at the University of Paris. After teaching French at universities in Romania and Egypt, he joined the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, where he devoted himself to research in sociology and lexicology. He was a professor at the College de France until his death in 1980.

Reviews

Barthes is an intellectual star, one of the very small group of maîtres à penser, such as Sartre, Levi-Strauss and Foucault... I readily proclaim that Mythologies is a kind of masterpiece, a fascinating book, the meaning of which sticks in the mind and can lend itself to all sorts of applications
*Observer*

Essays on the codings that command our daily life (from hair-styles in the film of Julius Caesar through glossy photos of gourmet cooking, to the cult of foam in detergents)...Mythologies has penetrating gusto
*Sunday Times*

Semiology is the study of the signs and signals, the symbols, gestures and messages through which western society sustains, sells, identifies and yet obscures itself by painting or powdering over its raddled, whore-like visage... Barthes' purpose is to tear away masks and demystify the signs, signals and symbols of the language of mass culture
*The Times*

All about the most ordinary things. He knew how to connect Racine and beach holidays, Freud and the anticipation of a lover's phone call. Like so many modern artists, he saw the deeper themes running through supposedly banal things.
*Daily Express*

This new edition brings into English for the first time all of the essays in the groundbreaking Mythologies by French semiotician and critic Barthes, translated by the redoubtable Howard (Flowers of Evil), and joins them with Lavers's earlier translation of Barthes's accompanying analytical essay, "Myth Today." Barthes examined mass culture, its ads and hidden or disguised messages, its icons and politics, its desperate speed in the mid-1950s. With several exceptions, these pensees are in delectable, bite-sized pieces. Though very much of their time, these essays tell us a lot about how we might intellectually navigate our own century. When the specifics are unfamiliar to a non-French reader, unobtrusive and cogent notes identify the individuals and issues. By framing the mythic in the quotidian, Barthes examines everything from detergent ("dirt is a sickly little enemy which flees from good clean linens at the first sign of Omo's judgment") to professional wrestling ("Wrestling is not a sport, it is a spectacle"), Garbo's face ("virtually sexless, without being at all 'dubious' "), Billy Graham, the Tour de France, a French striptease, plastics, and onward. With so much new material now included, this volume is not an unabridged reissue so much as a celebration anew. 16 pages of b&w illus. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

An abridged English translation of Mythologies (1957), one of Barthes's most famous books, has been available since 1972, but it omitted 25 of the original essays, included here. Overall, Barthes (1915-80) argues in these diverse pieces, both the newly available and the others, that many customs accepted as a matter of course are in fact narratives that disclose their meaning under close analysis. He considers, among other subjects, professional wrestling, maintaining that each gesture has its place in a story. Likewise, why do astrology columns offer advice on particular subjects (this is one of the newly available essays)? What is the significance of Greta Garbo's face? The book has a political dimension; one of Barthes's principal targets is the petit-bourgeois movement of Pierre Poujade. Many essays concentrate on aspects of French life in the 1950s. Aside from these, the book includes a long theoretical section, still in the original English translation by Annette Lavers, in which Barthes explains his approach to myth, stressing the affinities of myth and language. VERDICT Barthes was one of the major French critics of the 20th century, and this fuller translation will be of interest to English-speaking students of French and comparative literature as well as to cultural anthropologists. [See Prepub Alert, 9/22/11.]-David Gordon, Bowling Green State Univ., OH (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.