1/28/2004   slide 35
Mythologies
•“…an ideological critique bearing on the language of so-called mass culture… a first attempt to analyze semiologically the mechanics of this language.” [Mythologies preface]
•“Myth…transforms history into nature.” [mythologies, pp?]
•
signifier 
SIGN
signified
SIGNIFIER 
SIGNIFIED
sign
Level 1: denotation (e.g., an iconic picture of Einstein—what he looked like)
Level 2: connotation (e.g., a mythology of knowledge reduced to a formula)
Similar to Foucault’s “discourse” analyses is Roland Barthes’ “mythologies”  -- another attempt to look beyond single images and even genres to the interrelated effects of image, text, and other media on our belief in the “naturalness” of certain ways of seeing and understand the world, and of our sense of ourselves as human and what it means to be human.  See Mythologies [Barthes 1972] for more detailed diagram with additional terminology.

A whole lot of new vocabulary (because its semiotics!) that I am not mentioning here..

Soap powder describes ways in which different types of cleaning chemical are becoming part of everyday life in France…