Transparency, incalculability, Mythologies today

Abstract

What would it mean to speak of the ‘migration into the Anglophone world’ of Barthes’s Mythologies? There are many ways in which one could answer such a question. Does ‘theory’ still exist, is it now dead? To employ Michael Payne’s and John Schad’s title, what does it currently mean to live ‘after theory’ and what is the current status of the translation (from a series of European words) that gave us the word ‘theory’? Is Barthes now immured within that archive once known as belles lettres? or is there a need to return to what must be Barthes’s most widely consumed text (Mythologies) within the Anglophone world? What has been and will be the fate of semiology? Mythologies is indisputably a core influence on the rise of Cultural Studies in the ‘worlds’ to which we are referring. Thinking about Mythologies today inevitably leads us to consider the status and function of Cultural Studies