A Study Of Roland Barthes' Theory Of "Social Myth"

Roland Barthes' social myth theory is the semiotic of western society and culture based on the 20C modern linguistics and structural anthropology.With historization as the inner logic in semantics and naturalization of historic characters as expression,he deciphers the western society and culture in discourse structure,code characteristics and logic,etc.In Mythologies,Roland Barthes think that myths are ways of being expressed,thus popular social phenomenon become social myths because of the quality can be expressed.Regarding social myth as a way of expression,Roland Barthes creatively constructed a two-tier symbol system under the guidance of 'signify' and 'signified' proposed by Saussure and linguistic semiotics by Louis Hjelmslev.It is clearly stated in Barthes's books that the principle of myth is to transfer history into nature.According to Barthes's theory,the myth makes sense with special cultural symbol systems that exist in social history,but contained cultural meaning has been turned particular into natural,permanent and unchangeable.And the specific social and cultural symbol system is able to express the authority and ideology in all kinds of unique words when connected with generalized ideology.Roland Barthes disclosed French bourgeoisie's manipulation of the public's thought through analyzing the social myth.This thesis mainly focuses on analysis of the certain meaning of the historic feature in Mythologies to illustrate the implied ideology in French society,summarization of the concrete factors that reflect the significance of history and nature through studying and inducing the practical cases of today's myths,and exploration of the working mechanism by probing into how the French bourgeoisie naturally performances the contents with features of history.There are three chapters in this thesis.Chapter I mainly talks about the theoretical origin and its deep influence of the mythological theory of Roland Barthes,it illustrates the two-tier symbol system in social myth of Roland Barthes' books with the method of semiotics.Myth is the process of second-tier transferring signify to signified.Moreover,it depicts that Barthes's core thinking of the myth system is hidden of history and expression of nature.In chapter ?,it studies what the exact meaning of history is in social myth by the principle of ideological analysis.And it generalizes factors of history into three parts:rich historical implication,national characteristics,and present social rule.In chapter ?,it emphasizes the specific meaning of nature in the context of social myth,which is actually a hypo-nature as a way of natural performance.Additionally,it summarizes four broad operating mechanisms that have been showed in natural ways:purposefully selecting contents,using symbolic signs,performing natural characters in unnatural ways,and inducing readers to take part in the inventing and interpreting process of myth.And it also gives some explanation and proof with the cultural examples in Mythology.