Roland Barthes

Today's lesson Becky, Meg and I worked on a prezi presentation on Roland Barthes who was born on the 12th of November in 1915 and unfortunately his life was ending in the year 1980 at the age of 64 on the 25th of March. He is known for being involved in being a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Roland wanted and got a license in grammar and philology, and in 1953 he created his first full length work called Writing Degree Zero. He also created Writer Sollers, The Eiffel Tower and other Mythologies, The Rustle of Language and Incidents.

"a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can read, they are indeterminable...the systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language..."

The quote above is from him on his theory, another quote about his theory was...

The narrative codes Barthes described are:
·         Action/proiarectic code & enigma code (ie Answers & questions)
·         Symbols & Signs
·         Points of Cultural Reference
·         Simple description/reproduction

Meaning he can unravel a text and give it many different meanings, like we can with a scene from a film.  

Becky researched information on his theory and Meg researched about his basic life, they both e-mailed me the work and i cut it down to add it into our prezi..... 

ENJOY :)

Roland Barthe on Prezi

This theory relates to Life on Mars because from each shot we are able to take many meanings just like when Roland can take many meanings from a peice of text.