About the book: 2008 / In the mid-1950s. R. Barth wrote a series of essays about the “universal” modern mythologization. Mythologies is a brilliant analysis of modern popular culture as a sign system. According to the author, the lifestyle of the average Frenchman is “saturated” with mythology. In the book, R. Barth semiotically explains the mechanism of the emergence of political myths as the transformation of history into ideology, subject to the symbolic design of this process. In the generalizing part of R. Barth’s work - the article “Myth Today” - both an explanation and a method of countering modern mythologization are proposed - the creation of a new artificial myth, the construction of a conditional, third level of mythology, if by the first we mean archaic-traditional, by the second - “new” ( like a scientific class, for example, Soviet). In R. Barth's research, the leading definition of myth is the word. Everything that is covered by discourse can become a myth, since “our world is infinitely suggestive.” R. Barthes, broadly interpreting the creative power of “bourgeois” myth-making, considered myths as constituent constructs of all cultural and sociopolitical phenomena in France. Myth, in accordance with the views of R. Barth, is a marking qualitative characteristic of the “anonymous” modern bourgeois society, while mythologization is a feature of all societies. http://fb2.traumlibrary.net