“With so much new material now included, this volume is not an unabridged reissue so much as a celebration anew.” - Publishers Weekly “One of the great public teachers of our time, someone who thought out, argued for, and made available serveral steps in a penetrating reflection on language sign systems, texts -and what they have to tell us about the concept of being human” - Peter Brooks of all the intellectual notables who have emerged since World War II in France, Roland Barthes is the one whose work I am most certain will endure” - Susan Sontag

“Teacher, man of letters, moralist, philospher of culture, connoisseur of strong ideas, protean autobiographer. This new edition of Mythologies, complete and beautifully rendered by the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, critic, and translator Richard Howard, is a consecration of Barthes's classic-a lesson in clairvoyance that is more relevant now than ever. What Barthes discerned in mass media, the fashion of plastic, and the politics of postcolonial France applies with equal force to today's social networks, the iPhone, and the images of 9/11. As Barthes sees it, these myths must be carefully deciphered, and debunked. They express myths of success, well-being, or happiness. They are the fabrications of consumer society. Yet all around us, in pop culture, politics, mainstream media, and advertising, there are codes and symbols that govern our choices. We decide to like or not, to believe or not, to buy or not. We have access to boundless information and prodigious quantities of stuff. We own devices that bring the world to the command of our fingertips. There is no more proper instrument of analysis of our contemporary myths than this book-one of the most significant works in French theory, and one that has transformed the way readers and philosophers view the world around them. 'No denunciation without its proper instrument of close analysis,' Roland Barthes wrote in his preface to Mythologies.

Barthes mythologies