Problem of meaning: many theories were created trying to solve this ‘problem of meaning’, but

all of those theories did not focus on facts or the manifested meaning, instead they looked the
text and its content as a ‘token’ for something else. For example, pschoanalysists looked for
latent meaning in a text. Structuralists looked for patterns connecting it to the bigger picture.

Mythology- type of speech

Semiology- science of forms

Form and structure go hand-in-hand. They can’t be proven to be separable (inexpressible).

Form- genres and how it appears within the world of literature

Structure- framework and sequencing of a work

Total criticism: formalism brings in a lot of significance of the past (history). Example: Saintliness
in Sartre’s Saint- Genet.

Mythology as a part of semiology, formal science, ideology and historical science equally.

Three terms in semiology: signifier, signified and sign

Signifier is the acoustic form of a word, the language manifested in the form of writing,
speaking or an image.

Signified is the mental image or mental concept that is created in the mind when one hears or
sees the lingual form.

The union of the signifier and the signified forms the sign. This is the tridimensional pattern of
the semiological system.

Example: roses and passion, black pebble and anonymous death vote

“Signifier is empty, sign is full”. Only when the signifier is weighed with signified, does it
become full and a sign with meaning.

Freud example: the dream theory. So in that, there is a manifest meaning(signifier) and a latent
meaning(signified). The combination of these two becomes the sign, which is the ‘dream in
totality’.

Sartre example: signified as the actual crisis (crisis in the storyline that he wrote) and the
signifier as the literature as discourse (literature as a medium to put forward the meaning, here
which is the crisis as within the storyline). The combination is the signification.
Shortcoming: only way of operating/ analysing using semiology is through deciphering or
reading.

Myth as a second- order semiological system

The sign in the first system, which is the total association of signifier and signified, becomes the
signifier in the second system.

So myth has two semiological systems; one is the linguistic system, which is called ‘language-
object’ and the other is the myth itself, which is called the ‘metalanguage’.

Language- object : it is called so because it is only the language that myth needs to build its
system on and it doesn’t bother much to know how the sign came about, from the signifier and
signified of the first system. Therefore, the writings and pictures are to seen as the same when
it comes to myth.

Metalanguage: it is called so because it is a second language, used to speak about the first
language.

Example: ‘ My name is Lion’. Here, the sign of the first system is the sentence and what it
implies on the surface, which is “My name is Lion”. This sign becomes the signifier in the second
system, where the signified is that it is an example of a grammatical structure and these two
combine to form the sign of the second system, which is the signification.

Another example of Negro French soldier saluting the flag.

Double function of myth: points out and makes us understand something as well as notifies and
imposes the same thing upon us.

Signifier Signified

(Combination of Signifier
and Signified) Lingusitic Sign / Meaning Signified / Concept
system
Signifier / Form
(Combination of Form
and Signifier) Mythical Signification
system