Mytologie – Barthes Roland (2018)

One of Roland Barthes’s most important works, this book begins with a series of short, perhaps surprisingly entertaining yet exceptionally well-developed reflections on aspects of contemporary consumer society, including wrestling, astrology and recipes in magazines. The second part attempts to place these texts within a broader theoretical framework. It is notable, among other things, as one of the first attempts to apply a semiological approach to specific cultural phenomena, and Barthes’s example is followed by countless successors in cultural theory, literary theory, political science and gender studies. The work made a major contribution to the transformation of the French intellectual scene in the second half of the twentieth century. It is one of the early expressions of a new way of thinking that moves away from the phenomenological and existentialist orientation of Sartre, Camus and Merleau-Ponty toward the structural and synchronic analysis of historical and contemporary phenomena associated with Foucault, Althusser, Derrida and others. The book is in Czech.