Recommendations
Books Like Mythologies by Roland Barthes
Works that unmask the ideological naturalization of the ordinary
Barthes shows how the Citroën DS, the wrestling match, and steak and chips are not natural facts but cultural myths — history presenting itself as nature. These works share that same project: revealing the arbitrary conventions that bourgeois culture presents as inevitable.
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Buy on AmazonLa Chambre claire
by Roland Barthes
Camera Lucida — Barthes's late masterpiece on photography and mourning; the studium and the punctum; written after his mother's death; the most personal and most beautiful Barthes
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Buy on AmazonS/Z
by Roland Barthes
The systematic structuralist analysis of Balzac's Sarrasine — sentence by sentence, code by code; the most rigorous application of the semiological method that Mythologies demonstrates
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Buy on AmazonLe Plaisir du texte
by Roland Barthes
The Pleasure of the Text — the distinction between plaisir (cultural satisfaction) and jouissance (disruptive bliss); Barthes's most accessible later work and the best follow-up to Mythologies
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Buy on AmazonTristes Tropiques
by Claude Lévi-Strauss
The structuralist anthropological memoir — Lévi-Strauss applying the same critical distance to Brazilian indigenous cultures that Barthes applies to French bourgeois ones; the shared structuralist project
- 5Buy on Amazon
L'Image publicitaire et les mythes du quotidien
by Guy Debord
The Society of the Spectacle — Debord's Situationist analysis of the spectacle as the accumulated capital of modern society; the political-materialist counterpart to Barthes's semiological demystification
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Buy on AmazonWays of Seeing
by John Berger
Berger's television series and book — the British popularization of the structuralist analysis of images; the most accessible introduction to the same kind of visual-culture criticism as Mythologies
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Buy on AmazonSurveiller et punir
by Michel Foucault
Foucault's analysis of the prison — the genealogical counterpart to Barthes's semiological demystification; both are asking how modernity makes its power relations seem natural and inevitable
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Buy on AmazonLa Distinction
by Pierre Bourdieu
Bourdieu's sociology of cultural taste — how class produces aesthetic preference while appearing to reflect natural sensibility; the sociological counterpart to Barthes's semiological analysis of myth
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