Rowland Barthes

Rowland Barthes

Narrative codes

• French Semiologist

• Suggested that narrative works with five different codes which activate the reader to make sense of it.

• He used the terms denotation and connotation to analyze images

Narratives is like a ball of string. Rowland Barthes was paid to look at ‘texts’ can you pick apart text like a ball of string?

Open or Closed?

All you need to know, again, very basically is that texts may be ‘open’ (i.e unravelled in a lot of different ways and are unresolved) or ‘closed’ (unravelled in a straightforward way and resolved)

Barthes also decided that the threads that you pull on to try and unravel meaning are called narrative codes and that they could be categorized in 5 ways.

ACTION CODE-a piece of action that requires a further piece of action. e.g a gunslinger draws his gun on an adversary and we wonder what the resolution of this will be

ENIGMA CODE-refers to any element in a story that is not explained and therefore exists as an enigma for the audience raising questions that demands explanation, so the audience is left wondering

SEMANTIC CODE-any element in a text that suggests a particular often additional meaning by way of connotation. There could be more meaning behind it.

CULTURAL CODE-any element in a narrative that refers “to a science or body of knowledge” In other words, the cultural codes tend to point to our shared knowledge about the way the world works. Using our culture to explain something

SYMBOLIC CODE-binary opposites, this is the grey area between two binary opposites.

Levi Straus- believed that the world was split into a series of ‘binary opposites.‘Essentially one thing can only be defined in a relationship to something it isn’t e.g a hero is only a hero if theres a villain

Ideology-An ideology is an organized collection of ideas. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things, a belief which helps explain the world around us. e.g Labour, Nazi party, Christianity