IMAGE BECOMES LANGUAGE: MEDIA AND CAPITALISM IN BARTHES’ RHETORIC OF THE IMAGE

Sadia Afrin, Sheikh Md. Muniruzzaman

Abstract


This paper focuses on the power of image and how image gradually turns into language. In postmodern era, media is an integral part in everyday life that dominates capital market by using plethora of images for media presentation and image production. In Rhetoric of the Image, Roland Barthes successfully shows the relation between media and capitalism. In his essay, Barthes uses the image of Panzani pasta through which he has conveyed different meanings that an image can represent. This essay is a classic semiotic text where Roland Barthes analyses an advertising image and uses it as a means of unraveling the mystery of how different messages are conveyed by a system of sign. In the light of Barthes’ Rhetoric of the Image, this paper scrutinizes how advertisement provides rich layers of meanings through a single image and the crucial role that the worldwide entertainment media is playing in global capital market.

 

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Keywords


image, media, capitalism, sign, rhetoric, postmodernism

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References


Barthes, R. Image-Music-Text, trans. S. Heath (1964); rpt. London: Wm. Collins Sons and Co., pp. 32-51. 1977.

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Jenks, C. Culture. “Visual Culture”. Routledge, New York, 2005.

Lane, Richard J. Jean Baudrillard. Routledge, New York, 2003.


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