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Summary: A great read for the train
Review: I was first exposed to this book as an undergraduate, and the same tattered old copy has remained with me ever since. It really changed the way I look at the world and the media that surrounds me. Beyond its subject matter though, it is just a pleasant read and is just long enough for the train ride from Boston to New York.
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Summary: Un pur Chef d'Oeuvre
Review: I'm French, and I read it in French. This book is an absolute must for any who wants to understand our Society. Although it's been written 45 years ago, it's more than ever actual, just like if that guy, as a clairvoyant, had been able to decode our present society (and all its incredible deviante face )half a century before. I must say I'll never see the world and medias like before again. More than a book, this is an enthralling weapon against mass passivity.
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Summary: ENLIGHTENING VIEWS ON WRESTLING AMONG OTHER THINGS
Review: This book requires a bit of trust on the part of younger readers (like myself) because it makes references to things that happened in the1950's. The world in the year 2000 is a very different place. However, MYTHOLOGIES by Roland Barthes is all the more intriguing for that reason.I found the essay and Wine and Milk quite engrossing. Equally intriguing were the ones on The Face of Garbo, Novels and Children, The Writer on Holiday, and Romans in Films. My favorite essay, however, was the one on Wrestling. I am not, nor have I ever been a wrestling fan. Perhaps I felt enlightened when I read the essay, especially when I compared it to wrestling today. Even though Roland Barthes brings up the fact, and acknowledges that French wrestling is different from American wrestling (remember, he's talking about the 50's and 60's), The differences have in my estimation only grown more noticeable. And yet the one thing that remains the same is that WRESTLING IS NOT A SPORT...it is a SPECTACLE. Through this essay I was able to add a new word to my French vocabulary... La Barbaque... meaning stinking meat. A term I wouldn't have associated, before reading Barthes, with wrestling. If you're an essay enthusiast, and enjoy reading about our immediate past, MYTHOLOGIES may be of interest to you.
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Summary: Behind the Amusement
Review: Ths book was written by an ardent Maoist in the heady days in which all of Parisian intellectual circles were Maoist. It is now a top read by anyone who comes into contact with the Maoist Literature Association (known as the MLA). Cultural Studies is an extension of Mao's Cultural Revolution. As with Mao, the idea was to change the meaning of virtually everything, taking the mandarin intellectual class, and moving them to the fringes of society, and taking the marginal farmers and moving them into the universities. In a similar way, Barthes takes marginal cultural activity such as professional wrestling, and moves it to the center of cultural discourse, while he takes Shakespeare, and the canon, and moves it to Manchuria. It's a heady experiment. In China, the result led to a staggered economy, massive famines, and the death of the entire intellectual class. In the west, it has mostly remained a literary curiosity, but one with a curious history. Barthes often praised the Maoists, and even travelled to China with other members of Tel Quel (Philippe Sollers and Julia Kristeva were fellow travellers, and they learned Chinese in order to translate Mao's poems into French). This book must be read in tandem with Simone de Beauvoir's book The Long March (about Mao's Revolution) and Julia Kristeva's Chinese Women, in order to give it a historical and intellectual context.
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Summary: Missing parts
Review: Well it's a great book or I should say the french version is great. The english version has been mutilated from severals important chapters. What a shame!!!
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Summary: Wonderful, and worth re-reading.
Review: When I finished this latest re-read of Mythologies I was initially struck by how funny it was. This was something of a big realization for me, stemming from a memory of burning brain cells with a furrowed brow, trying to understand what he was saying and being almost afraid to enjoy it. So there's one of the consolations for growing older for you-- I'm getting confident to really enjoy Barthes. I'm not saying that I fully understand him yet. I'm not sure that I ever will. I think that "Myth Today"(the book's final and most central essay) still remains fairly firmly out of reach. But it's true that each time I re-read Barthes, I get something more out of it-- I manage to scale heights that I didn't think I would ever get to the last time around. Isn't it the mark of a brilliant book that it grows with you? Particularly recommended this time are the essays "Soap Powders and Detergents" and "Operation Margarine".
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