Roland Barthes

The man in the image above is Roland Barthes, a French critic and theorist whose ideas about semiotics and anthropology have influenced the development of many media schools.  Throughout my A2 media coursework, I will be looking at a number of his different theories, such as The Death of the Author, Effect of Reality, and his 5 Narrative Codes.

 

The Death of the Author

 

Barthes proposed the theory of The Death of the Author in 1967. He believed that an author's intentions and biographical facts should hold no weight in regards to an interpretation of their writing.

In a well-known quotation, Barthes draws an analogy between text and textiles, declaring that a "text is a fabric of quotations", produced from "innumerable centres of culture", rather than from one, individual experience. The meaning of a work depends on the impressions of the reader, rather than the "passions" of the writer; "a text's unity lies not in its origins", or its creator, "but in its destination", or its audience.

Barthes refers to the author as the "scriptor" to disrupt the link between the terms "author" and "authority."

 

Ideas presented in The Death of the Author were anticipated to some extent by the New Criticism, a school of literary criticism important in the US from the 1940s to the 1970s. However, New Criticism is different compared to Barthes' theory of critical reading because it attempts to arrive at more authoritative interpretations of texts. Nevertheless, the crucial New Critical precept of the "intentional fallacy" declares that a poem does not belong to its author; rather, "it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it. The poem belongs to the public."

 

Effect of Reality

 

The effect of reality is a textual device identified by Barthes, the purpose of which was to establish literary texts as realistic. He did say however that this 'reality effect' is a fraud and the 'readerly/realist' text is a safe and passive medium. The readerly text focuses on the reader by conforming to the reader's expectations and thus creating the passive reader.

 

The writerly text is one in which the writer respects the reader's intelligence and challenges assumptions by moving away from the established conventions.

The Five Narrative Codes

 

Barthes described a text as "a galaxy of signifiers; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one." In other words, Barthes viewed a text as like a tangled ball of threads that needed to be unravelled, and once unravelled, the text will be polysemantic and accountable to an absolute wide range of potential meanings.

 

The theorist narrowed down the action of a text into Five codes which are woven into any narrative:

 

1. The Hermeneutic Code - this is the voice of the truth. It is the way the narrative will avoid telling the truth or revealing all of the facts, but will drop clues throughout in order to create a mystery for the audience.
2. The Enigma Code - this is the empirical voice. It is the way the narrative builds up tension so that the audience is left guessing what happens next.
3. The Semantic Code - this is the voice of the person. This code points to any element in a text that may suggest a particular, often additional meaning by way of connotation which the story suggests.
4. The Symbolic Code - this is the voice of symbols. Very similar to the semantic code, the symbolic code organises semantic meanings into broader and deeper sets of meaning. This is typically done in the use of antithesis, where new meaning arises out of opposing and conflict ideas.
5. The Cultural Code - this is the voice of science. This narrative looks as the wider cultural knowledge, morality and ideology of the audience.