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The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies
In this appealing and luminous collection of short essays, Roland Barthes examines the mundane and exposes hidden texts, causing the reader to look afresh at the famous landmark and symbol of Paris, and also at the Tour de France, the visit to Paris of Billy Graham, the flooding of the Seine—and other shared events and aspects of everyday experience.
155 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1970
About the author
Roland Barthes
366 books2,248 followersRoland Barthes of France applied semiology, the study of signs and symbols, to literary and social criticism.
Ideas of Roland Gérard Barthes, a theorist, philosopher, and linguist, explored a diverse range of fields. He influenced the development of schools of theory, including design, anthropology, and poststructuralism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_...
Ideas of Roland Gérard Barthes, a theorist, philosopher, and linguist, explored a diverse range of fields. He influenced the development of schools of theory, including design, anthropology, and poststructuralism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_...
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
June 27, 2019
Roland Barthes could seemingly write about anything, and get a real buzz out of it, regardless of what it was. His fresh, dazzling observations and ever-surprising revelations, make this book a good little companion to his brilliant earlier work 'Mythologies'. From The Eiffel Tower, Martians, and shock-photos, to African Grammar, Strike Action, and le Tour de France, these twenty-nine short essays are, for those familiar with his work, everything you would come to expect from the Parisian. His prowess for his subjects was again simply sublime!
September 19, 2023
Yaşayıp, hissedip, üzerinde fazlaca düşünmediğimiz unsurlar, nesneler, fikirler, bu metni okurken, berraklaştı, evvelce fark edilmemiş olması şaşırttı.
Mutlaka dikkatle ve yeterli zaman ayırarak okunması ve üzerinde düşünülmesi gereken iki metin.
“… Metalurji, taşımacılık, demokrasi: Eiffel, yaşadığı yüzyıla, Kule’si içinde, işte bu üç fethin somut simgesine vermiştir. …”, sf; 28,
“…sanat değerleri konusunda bile hiçbir zaman gelecek önceden kestirilemez….”, sf; 30.
Mutlaka dikkatle ve yeterli zaman ayırarak okunması ve üzerinde düşünülmesi gereken iki metin.
“… Metalurji, taşımacılık, demokrasi: Eiffel, yaşadığı yüzyıla, Kule’si içinde, işte bu üç fethin somut simgesine vermiştir. …”, sf; 28,
“…sanat değerleri konusunda bile hiçbir zaman gelecek önceden kestirilemez….”, sf; 30.
March 16, 2007
i loved this book. it's actually really fun to read, but you'll put this book down and think skeptically about everything around you. if you take yourself too seriously as you're reading this, you'll become a really, really annoying graduate student. but the reading itself is entertaining.
June 9, 2008
On one level the ultimate collection of essays on Paris, and on another thought, it's how we look at these 'images' of an iconic city. Roland Barthes is such a great writer and brain, that it is like being in a cafe with a super intelligent person and you don't want that cafe to close down.
December 1, 2023
yorum yazacağım
November 14, 2021
Roland Bartles'ın semioloji ve anlamlandırma üzerine deneme kitabı, Eiffel Kulesi benzetmeleri oldukça ilginç.
February 6, 2024
Eating your lunch in the very place you hate the most just to not see it is really something to think about
September 21, 2013
"This generally intellectual character of the panoramic vision is further attested by the following phenomenon, which Hugo and Michelet had moreover made into the mainspring of their bird's–eye views: to perceive Paris from above is infallibly to imagine a history; from the top of the Tower, the mind finds itself dreaming of the mutation of the landscape which it has before its eyes; through the astonishment of space, it plunges into the mystery of time, lets itself be affected by a kind of spontaneous anamnesis: it is duration itself which is panoramic" (Barthes, pg. #11).
"… [S]ometimes maternally plunged earthward, sometimes ecstatically raised, the actor's face seems to unite with his celestial home in an ascension without haste and without muscles, quite contrary to the onlooking humanity which, belonging to a different zoological class and capable of movement only by the legs (and not by the face), must return to its apartment on foot. (What we need is a historical psychoanalysis of truncated iconographies. To walk is perhaps—mythologically—the most trivial, hence the most human gesture. Every dream, every ideal image, every social preferment first suppresses the legs, either by portrait or by automobile)" (Barthes, pg. #20).
"Then, too, these names keep recurring; they form certain fixed points in the great risk of the ordeal, whose task is to fasten an episodic, tumultuous duration to the stable of the great characters, as if man were, above all, a name which enables him to master events[…]" (Barthes, pg. #79).
"The Tour's geography, too, is entirely subject to the epic necessity of ordeal. Elements and terrain are personified, for it is against them that man measures himself, and as in every epic it is important that the struggle should match equal measures: man is therefore naturalized, Nature humanized" (Barthes, pg. #81).
"As a matter of fact, the dynamics of the Tour knows only four movements: to lead, to follow, to escape, to collapse. […] These four movements are obviously dramatized, cast into the emphatic vocabulary of the crisis; often it is one of them, in the form of an image, which gives its name to the relay, as to the chapters of a novel […]. Language's role is enormous here, it is language which gives the event—ineffable because ceaselessly dissolved into duration—the epic promotion which allows it to be solidified" (Barthes, pgs. #84–85).
"The Tour thus possesses a veritable Homeric geography. As in the Odyssey, the race is here both a periplus of ordeals and a total exploration of the earth's limits. Ulysses reached the ends of the Earth several times. The Tour, too, frequently grazes an inhuman world: on Mount Ventoux, we are told, the racers have already left the planet Earth, encountering here unknown stars. By its geography, the Tour is thus an encyclopedic survey of human space; and if we were to refer to some Viconian schema of History, the Tour would represent in it that ambiguous moment when man strongly personifies nature in order to confront it more readily and to free himself more completely" (Barthes, pgs. #82–83).
"I believe that the Tour is the best example we have ever encountered of a total, hence an ambiguous myth; the Tour is at once a myth of expression and a myth of projection, realistic and utopian at the same time. The Tour expresses and liberates the French people through a unique fable in which the traditional impostures (psychology of essences, ethics of combat, magism of elements and forces, hierarchy of supermen and servants) mingle with forms of a positive interest, of a utopian image of a world which stubbornly seeks reconciliation by the spectacle of a total clarity of relations between man, men, and Nature" (Barthes, pg. #87).
"… [S]ometimes maternally plunged earthward, sometimes ecstatically raised, the actor's face seems to unite with his celestial home in an ascension without haste and without muscles, quite contrary to the onlooking humanity which, belonging to a different zoological class and capable of movement only by the legs (and not by the face), must return to its apartment on foot. (What we need is a historical psychoanalysis of truncated iconographies. To walk is perhaps—mythologically—the most trivial, hence the most human gesture. Every dream, every ideal image, every social preferment first suppresses the legs, either by portrait or by automobile)" (Barthes, pg. #20).
"Then, too, these names keep recurring; they form certain fixed points in the great risk of the ordeal, whose task is to fasten an episodic, tumultuous duration to the stable of the great characters, as if man were, above all, a name which enables him to master events[…]" (Barthes, pg. #79).
"The Tour's geography, too, is entirely subject to the epic necessity of ordeal. Elements and terrain are personified, for it is against them that man measures himself, and as in every epic it is important that the struggle should match equal measures: man is therefore naturalized, Nature humanized" (Barthes, pg. #81).
"As a matter of fact, the dynamics of the Tour knows only four movements: to lead, to follow, to escape, to collapse. […] These four movements are obviously dramatized, cast into the emphatic vocabulary of the crisis; often it is one of them, in the form of an image, which gives its name to the relay, as to the chapters of a novel […]. Language's role is enormous here, it is language which gives the event—ineffable because ceaselessly dissolved into duration—the epic promotion which allows it to be solidified" (Barthes, pgs. #84–85).
"The Tour thus possesses a veritable Homeric geography. As in the Odyssey, the race is here both a periplus of ordeals and a total exploration of the earth's limits. Ulysses reached the ends of the Earth several times. The Tour, too, frequently grazes an inhuman world: on Mount Ventoux, we are told, the racers have already left the planet Earth, encountering here unknown stars. By its geography, the Tour is thus an encyclopedic survey of human space; and if we were to refer to some Viconian schema of History, the Tour would represent in it that ambiguous moment when man strongly personifies nature in order to confront it more readily and to free himself more completely" (Barthes, pgs. #82–83).
"I believe that the Tour is the best example we have ever encountered of a total, hence an ambiguous myth; the Tour is at once a myth of expression and a myth of projection, realistic and utopian at the same time. The Tour expresses and liberates the French people through a unique fable in which the traditional impostures (psychology of essences, ethics of combat, magism of elements and forces, hierarchy of supermen and servants) mingle with forms of a positive interest, of a utopian image of a world which stubbornly seeks reconciliation by the spectacle of a total clarity of relations between man, men, and Nature" (Barthes, pg. #87).
July 9, 2022
I think I remember being unenthusiastic about this one, and would probably rather re-read Mythologies or The Pleasure of the Text. Perhaps I will try this one again at some point, see if I like it better on a second reading.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews