Media Theorists, and Creativity Revisited

My latest task was to research a particular media theorist in terms of narrative structures. I chose Roland Barthes, an influential 70s postmodernist who wrote several books, one of which was an auto-biography where he analysed himself as a text.

His most famous piece of work is probably the idea of the 'author' and the 'scriptor', otherwise known as 'The Death of the Author'. Barthes' theory is that instead of the author being the one to give meaning to a text, it is now the readers own experience and knowledge of conventions that brings meaning to a text. In conjuction with this, he also described media texts as being either 'open' or 'closed'. An open media texts could have any number of threads of meaning, all depending on the readers experience. Whereas a closed text could only have one main thread of meaning. These 'threads' of meaning were decided by Barthes as being 'narrative codes', and he categorised 5 of them:

• Action/proiarectic code & enigma code (Answers and Questions)#
• Symbols and Signs
• Points of Cultural Reference
• Simple Description/reproduction

This information I have learnt from a handy site which has all kinds of articles on different media concepts, one which I found while researching.