Roland Barthes was born on the 12th November 1915 and died at the age of 64 on the 25th March 1980. He was a French

literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician (study of cultural signs and symbols). He explored a diverse range of

fields and he influenced the development of schools.

Roland Barthes(Basic Info)

Roland Barthes describes a text as: "a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; 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; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can read, they are indeterminable...the systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language..." (S/Z - 1974 translation)

Codes Theory

• The text is like a tangled ball of threads • The thread needs to unravelled • Once unravelled, we encounter an absolute wide range of

potential meanings. • We can start by looking at a narrative in one way, from

one viewpoint, one set of previous experience, and create one meaning for that text.

• You can continue by unravelling the narrative from a different angle and create an entirely different meaning.

What he meant …

“Barthes said that texts may be ´open´ or ´closed´”

• The Hermeneutic Code (HER)

• The Enigma/ Proairetic Code (ACT)

• The Symbolic Code (SYM)

• The Cultural Code (REF)

• The Semantic Code (SEM)

Linguist Roland Barthes narrowed down the action of a text in to Five Codes which are woven into any narrative:

The Hermeneutic Code (HER) (the voice of the truth)

Is the way the story avoids telling the truth or

revealing all the facts, in order to drop clues in through out to help create mystery.

The Enigma/ Proairetic Code (ACT) (empirical voice)

The way the tension is built up and the audience is left guessing what happens next

The Semantic Code (SEM)(the voice of the person)

The semantic code points to any element in a text that suggests a particular, often additional meaning by way of connotation which the story suggests.

Connotation= cultural/underlining meaning, what it symbolises.

The Symbolic Code (SYM) (the voice of symbols)

This is very similar to the Semantic Code, but acts at a wider level, organizing 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.

The Cultural Code (REF) (the voice of science)

Looks at the audiences wider cultural knowledge, morality and ideology.