Mythologies

The Complete Edition, in a New Translation

Roland Barthes; Translated from the French by Richard Howard

Hill and Wang

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“No denunciation without its proper instrument of close analysis,” Roland Barthes wrote in his preface to Mythologies. 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.

Our age is a triumph of codification. We own devices that bring the world to the command of our fingertips. We have access to boundless information and prodigious quantities of stuff. We decide to like or not, to believe or not, to buy or not. We pick and choose. We think we are free. Yet all around us, in pop culture, politics, mainstream media, and advertising, there are codes and symbols that govern our choices. They are the fabrications of consumer society. They express myths of success, well-being, or happiness. As Barthes sees it, these myths must be carefully deciphered, and debunked.

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. 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.

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Praise for Mythologies

“My claim is to live to the full contradiction of my time.” —Roland Barthes, preface to the 1957 edition

“Teacher, man of letters, moralist, philosopher of culture, connoisseur of strong ideas, protean autobiographer . . . 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

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About the Author

Roland Barthes; Translated from the French by Richard Howard

Roland Barthes was born in 1915. A French literary theorist, philosopher, and critic, he influenced the development of various schools of theory, including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, and post-structuralism. He died in 1980.

Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes

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Available Formats and Book Details

Mythologies
The Complete Edition, in a New Translation
Roland Barthes; Translated from the French by Richard Howard

Hardcover

Hardcover
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Hill and Wang
March 2012
Hardcover
ISBN: 9780374532345
ISBN10: 0374532346
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches, 288 pages, 8 Pages of Black-and-White Illustrations
$27.00
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Trade Paperback

Learn more about this edition
Trade Paperback
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Hill and Wang
January 1972
Trade Paperback
ISBN: 9780374521509
ISBN10: 0374521506
5 5/16 x 8 inches, 160 pages
$14.00
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