Barthe

The relationship between form and concept is dynamic and potentially ambiguous: "It is this constant game of hide-and-seek between the meaning and the form which defines myth" (7). Because of the game, myth is inherently unstable because meanings and their importance can shift over time. What is important is that a meaning is in the background of the textual form. In that regard, Barthes cites the theoretical disciplines of structuralism and psychoanalysis, as well as various kinds of literary criticism as being "not content with meeting the facts: they define and explo

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as a power that will survive the critique: [M]yth essentially aims at causing an immediate impression--it does not matter if one is later allowed to see through the myth, its action is assumed to be stronger than the rational explanations which may later belie it. This means that the reading of a myth is exhausted at one stroke. . . . A more attentive reading of the myth will in no way increase its power or its ineffectiveness: a myth is at the same time imperfectible and unquestionable; time or knowledge will not make it better or worse (Barthes 15). In the section titled "Myth As Stolen Language," Barthes creates a dense and complex argument the gist of which is stated early on, that it is "characteristic of myth . . . to transform a meaning into form" (16). His argument, which uses arcane examples from minor Flaubert to support it, seems to be that the language of myth can be ambiguous and that the desire to make meanings does not necessarily translate into artifacts serving a cultural objective that are adequate to conveying it. In nay case, critics of mythic assertions need to be alert to ambiguities of form. Now if that is the general line of thought, it quickly becomes apparent that this is actually a kind of introduction
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Approximate Word count = 1334
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)