ROLAND BARTHESAND

SEMIOTICS

By Eloise Barrett

Roland BarthesRoland Barthes was born on the 12th November 1915 and dies on the 26th March 1980 and he was a French literary critic, literary and social theorist, philosopher and semiotician.

He studied at the University of Paris and took a degree in classical letters in 1939 and then in 1943 he took a degree in grammar and philology.

In 1976 he became the first person to hold the chair of literary semiology at the College de France.

SemioticsSemiotics-the study of signs and symbols and their use or interpretation.

In a semiotic sense, signs take the forms of words, images, sounds, gestures and objects.

Barthes’s Semiotic Theory broke down the process of reading signs and focused on their interpretation by different cultures or societies. He believed that every ideological sign is either a Denotative sign system or a Connotative sign system. Semiotic Theory is an ‘interpretive’ theory and can be applied to most aspects of everyday life, though most people would not realise it.Denotative sign- a strictly descriptive system, the result of the signifier image and the signifies concept of combining.Connotative sign- one that has lost its historical meaning. Could be due to a number of things including: change in culture or terminology, an event, or even just evolution.

A sign must have a signifier and a signified. Sometimes we use the same signifier for different signifieds.

Semiotic AnalysisThree Steps:1) Analyse verbal signs2) Analyse visual signs3) Analyse symbolic message

What you see

Interpretation