2. Who is he?
• Born November 12th 1915 in Cherbourg,
France.
• Died march 25th 1980 in Paris, France.
• Barthes was a French essayist and social and
literary critic.
3. Barthes in Media Studies
• ‘Barthes argued that the reader produced new
meanings when reading a text, making use of
previous experiences. Therefore different people
read different things from a text. Texts may be
open and have many meanings/interpretations or
texts could be closed and have only one meaning.’
(heathenmedia.co.uk)
• Barthes also created several ‘codes’ which he
believes are interwoven in any narrative.
4. The Hermeneutic Code
• any element of the story that is not fully
explained and hence becomes a mystery to
the reader. The full truth is often avoided.
• The purpose in this is typically to keep the
audience guessing, until the final scenes when
everything is explained and all loose ends are
tied off.
5. The Proairetic Code
• Builds tension referring to any other action or
event that indicates something else is going to
happen, and which hence gets the reader
guessing as to what will happen next.
• The Hermeneutic and Proairetic Codes work
as a pair to develop the story's tensions and
keep the reader interested.
6. The Semantic Code
• Connotation within the story that gives
additional meaning over the basic denotative
meaning of the word.
• It is through the use of extended meaning that
can be applied to words that authors can
create images with relatively limited text and
the way they do this is a common indication of
their writing skills.
7. The Symbolic Code
• very similar to the Semantic Code, but acts at
a more general level, organizing semantic
meanings into broader and deeper sets of
meaning.
8. The Cultural Code
• refers to anything that is founded on some
kind of official works that cannot be
challenged and is assumed to be a foundation
for truth.
• Typically this involves either science or
religion.
