Sara Dean

Barthes was a famous theorist that created a theory within narratology that said: “there are five specific „codes‟ that makes a literary text reflect on it‟s structures but isn‟t a definite way to close the meanings within the piece of text”.

These codes are a way for the speaker to „voice‟ the narrative aspect of something. They also for the while they are used seem to dominate the text whereas on their own they only weave into the text.

The three levels of signification are; denotation, Connotation and Myth.

This is the way that the story tries to avoids telling the truth and/or revealing the facts so it can drop in hints of throughout to help create

mystery.

This is the way that tension gets built up and creates a mystery and makes the audience ask:

what happens next?

The semantic code points to any element in a text that suggest an additional meaning by using connotation which the story suggests

Connotation = cultural/underlining meaning, what it symbolises.

This is similar to the semantic code but it acts at a wider level, organising the semantic

meanings into a deeper and broader set of meanings. This is done in the use of

antithesis, where the new meaning arises out of the opposing and conflicting ideas.

This looks at the audiences wider cultural knowledge, morality and ideology.

Levi-Strauss created a theory that said the binary opposites are just that-opposites. An example would be that the word „coward‟ depends on the difference between the word and it‟s opposing idea of „hero‟, this shows that one of the opposites is seen by a particular society or culture that one is more valued than the other.