Mythologies

The series of essays "Mythologies" presents a brilliant analysis of mass culture as a sign system.

The author semiotically explains the mechanism of the emergence of political myths as the transformation of history into ideology, conditioned by the signification of this process. In the summarizing part of the work - the article "Myth Today" - an explanation and a method for opposing contemporary mythologization is proposed - the creation of the newest artificial myth, constructing a conditional, third level of mythology, if the first is understood as archaico-traditional, and the second - as "new" (like the scientific class, for example, the Soviet one).

In the studies of R. Barthes, the leading definition of myth is the word. Everything that is covered by discourse can become a myth, as "our world is infinitely suggestive". According to Barthes, myth is a marking qualitative characteristic of the "anonymous" modern bourgeois society, while mythologization is regarded as a feature of all societies.