Difference between revisions of "Roland Barthes"

Revision as of 14:38, 29 March 2018

The Reality Effect

Roland Barthes. "The Reality Effect." [Not sure on source]

• read with Freedgood 2006 for opposing perspective
• structuralist -> poststructuralist
• "useless details" as "narrative luxury" that increase the "cost of narrative information"
• narrative: predictive, forward moving ("traffic control")
  • description: additive, analogical
• What are insignificant details doing?
• rhetoric of vivid description (hypotyposis)
• balance of aesthetic (requiring meaning) and referential (reference to real world external to text) constraints
  • the idea of a real referent prevents a spiral into endless detail
• the illusion of a referent: if it refers to something real, we don't have access to it
  • chair is there not to signify "chair" but to signify reality
• sophisticated rhetorical attempts to access reality but knowing they only have words that may refer to only other words