Roland Barthes

Basic Information:

Roland Barthes was born on the 12th November 1915, he later died at the age of 64. He was a french literary theorist, philosopher, critic and semiotician. This means he studied signs and symbols. He explored a diverse range of fields and he also influenced the development of our current schools.

What his theory meant basically was:
- The text is like a tangled ball of threads and needs to be unravelled and thought out.
- Once the text is unravelled you encounter an 'absolute wide range of potential meanings.'
- You can start looking at the narrative in one way from a single 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.

Roland Barthes' five codes:
- The Hermeneutic Code (HER & the voice of truth)
This is the way a story avoids telling the truth or revealing the 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 as to what happens next in the text.

- The Symbolic Code (SYM & the voice of the 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.

- 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 the way of connotation* which the story suggests.

*connotation = what something means without actually saying it, hidden/underlining meaning.