Theory (Elizabeth Mensah-Tandoh)

I thought it essential for me to find about the influential French literally theorist Roland Barthes. He developed a theory that there are five major codes within a story that are interwoven in order to create meaning. Barthes had five codes,The first being.

A Hermeneutic Code- is something that is unexplained and which creates an unanswered question, often appearing at the beginning of the story,creating a tension that engages the audience.
Hermeneutic codes are at the root of all mysteries. act is shown and the remainder of the narrative is for answering questions raised by the event. And in order for the audience to remain interested the final truth is not revealed.

The Proairetic Code-The Proairetic Code also builds tension, referring to any other action or event that indicates something else is going to happen, and which hence gets the reader guessing as to what will happen next.
The Hermeneutic and Proairetic Codes work as a pair to develop the story's tensions and keep the reader interested. Barthes described them as,dependent on,two sequential codes.The revelation of truth and the coordination of the actions represented: there is the same constraint in the gradual order of melody and in the equally gradual order of the narrative sequence.

The Semantic Code-This code refers to connotation within the story that gives additional meaning over the basic denotative meaning of the word.It is by the use of extended meaning that can be applied to words that authors can paint rich pictures with relatively limited text and the way they do this is a common indication of their writing skills.

The Symbolic Code- which is very similar to the Semantic Code, but acts at a wider level, organizing semantic meanings into broader and deeper sets of meaning. This is done by the use of antithesis, where new meaning arises out of opposing and conflict ideas.

The Cultural Code-This code refers to anything that is founded on some kind of canonical works that cannot be challenged and is assumed to be a foundation for truth.This involves either science or religion, although other canons such as magical truths may be used in fantasy stories. The Gnomic Code is a cultural code that particularly refers to sayings, proverbs, clichés and other common meaning-giving word sets.

I learned all this information by looking at a powerpoint that my teacher gave me and also researching on various websites.So that was able to find out the real facts about Roland Barthes. This source of information has been helpful as it has actually really helpful to know when you are considering what to film.