Although semiotics is a recognized discipline within the study of communication, it remains at the margins of popular discourse. Semiotics offers specialized tools that address the need to understand the communicative qualities that distinguish various mass media and evolving media technologies. Considering the prevalence of myth in mass communication and popular culture, this method addresses the ambiguity of myth analysis and should prove useful for teaching media literacy. This provided the momentum for the idea to extend Hjelmslev's formula for semiosis to the analysis of myth. In this same collection of essays, he suggests that the meaning from one sign can be used as the signifier of a higher order of the sign (Barthes 1972: 114). In Mythologies (1972), Barthes essays offer a sense of the subtle potential and ideological impact of myth embedded in popular culture. Concerned about what Barthes called 'ideological abuse' (1972: 11) concealed in media and culture, my project is to provide a way to reveal myth and understand its nature. Principally emanating from the work of Roland Barthes, this method assimilates ideas from several prominant semitotic theorists.

The purpose of this paper is to articulate and demonstrate an elegant, logical semiotic methodology applied to the analysis of cultural myth.

Introduction: Confronting the Ideology of Myth in Popular Culture

Semiotic Analysis of Myth: A Proposal for an Applied Methodology The American Journal of SEMIOTICS, 17:2 (Summer 2001) Pages 311-327.

Barthes mythologies 1957