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  • Essay / The concept of myth in the book "Mythology" by Roland Barthes

    Roland Barthes, French philosopher of the 20th century, specialist in structuralism, post-structuralism and semiotics. He emerged with the idea of ​​the Myth in his book Mythology, and he mentions two examples: The Blue Guide and “French Toys”. First, analyzing these examples is necessary to understand the concept of myth. Myth is made up of connotation, meaning is always the second level of understanding, inserting divergent nuances and new associated meanings, naturalizing this connotation into a true and authentic aspect in societies. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”?Get an original essaySo in The Blue Guide we can understand the denotation, the first level and the meaning as a tourist book. Nevertheless, the author maintains that the book is “an agent of blindness” (Roland Barthes 1957: 76). Because connotation is the second level of meaning of the guide, the mythology present here gives a status quo of Christian monuments and churches, and does not show the true life of the Spanish being, local culture and daily way of life and ordinary. In this way, for the guide, people are just a typification, the guide is an old-fashioned bourgeois type of propaganda of these landscapes and transmission of this history of nature to Spanish society. Furthermore, French toys provide us with another example of myth. , the level of denotation is that this object is the miniature of human life for children to play with. However, the second level, the inherent connotation of this toy as a miniature of adult life, is to prepare children for the future role of their lives, teaching them to become adults, as we can see in this article by Barthes “All the toys that we commonly see are essentially a microcosm of the adult world” (Roland Barthes 1957: 53). Therefore, the toy myth naturalizes the miniature of human life and integrates it into children's lives to provide the conditions for duties in adulthood. Furthermore, another example that can be analyzed as a myth is the "Swart Piet", a character from Dutch culture. The physical appearance of this folkloric character was first described in Jan Schenkman's book "Sint Nikolaas en zijn knecht" in free translation Saint Nicholas and his servant. Keep in mind: this is just a sample. Get a personalized paper now from our expert writers. Get a Custom Essay And this is a controversial discussion, while some people argue that "Swart Piet" is an ingenious sidekick of a child's tail who helps Saint Nicholas simply analyze the level of denotation, antitheses to what There is the level of connotation, other nuances and ingrained meanings of this racist character, underestimating and denigrating the image of black people. With this in mind, we can understand that myth is a connotation, the second level of understanding associated with an object. The three examples presented above expose and reveal the levels of connotations attached to each context and how this process can be integrated and naturalized in societies...