Critical Studies week 3-4

Critical Studies Journal
[weeeks 3-4]
On Roland Barthes' The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies:

RB, ever the urbane travel writer discusses what must be his all-time favorite subject: Paris.
The discussion is couched in a sweetly flavoured travel prose about the curious object/subject condition of the Eiffel Tower.

Reading this article was like sitting next to RB on the bus headed for an entertaining table and a number of bottles of respectable wine at a local cafe. If there is anything RB knows about it is Paris, The Eiffel Tower and Mythologies, having written a book by the title.

RB's Eiffel Tower article could easily have fit into "Mythologies" and I am impressed at how RB doesn't seem to fall into the same "moments of incoherence" as some of the other writers I (we) have been encouraged to get acquainted with lately. While RB does pry open our awareness of a subject and discuss it's semiotic dimensions he does so very smoothly, and even when he delves deeply, following a thread to a mere wisp, he safely deposits you back to a familiar bus stop.

RB rationalizes that Paris has become "nature" as observed from a high place. This "empty" monument to modernity functions as a provider of a natural vistas like the side of a mountain would to a valley below. The tower is a real force of semiotic nature to RB and like a mountain an imutable and ubiquitous sight on the Parisian landscape.