>The cultural work done in the past by gods and epic sagas

>>9923602
I'm thinking of buying this.

why is that cover orange my cover is green

>>9923602

Momma's boy Barthes got worked by the French wrestling scene.

>>9923602

Yes, we have clearly not extinguished the use of allegory and myth. But the link on that particular quote seems pretty weak to me. Or, at least, the ontology portrayed by comic-strips and commercials is very weak compared to a saga. Is Barthes somehow implying our culture has developed into short bursts of less meaning or is that quote just not enough without the context?

I always thought his name was John?

>>9923647
Roland Barthes, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and Frederick Barthelme are all different authors with similar names

>>9923651
those are pseudonyms I have heard from my literary friends

It reeks of "we're all slaves to the man" blather, but there's a sliver of truth to it. We used to be united by our stories/culture, but the rise of industrialization has allowed us to share our stories/culture with everyone. Now we align ourselves ideologically, and for many that includes what clothes we buy, what food we eat, how we spend our time, which all come back to the corporations that enable those desires.

>>9923651
Let's not forget ol' 20th c theologian Karl Barth in that ghoulish mix or 'goulash' mateys....

>>9923640
The latter I think obviously. For some reason Walter Benjamin's fabulous essay on Nikolai Leskov and the Death of Storytelling comes to mind.

>>9923602
Mythologies is a cool book. My copy has a bunch of marginalia notes by a guy who was dyslexic, and underlined random uninteresting sentences.

But yeah, the quote you grabbed, it's spot on. I read a psychology article one time that talked about how our brains can only handle a small group of known individuals. Many of these 'slots' are taken up by friends, family, co-workers, but many are taken up with celebrities, spokesmen, cartoon characters. In the past, a man might have mused about Zeus or Jesus, today we think about Trump and Harry Potter. They are our demigods (among others).