Roland Barthes Lesson

Being a semiologist Roland Barthes was being paid to look at texts.

Texts may be:
Open-unravelled, in many threads E.g soaps
Closed-only one obvious thread to pull on E.g Children programmes
Barthes decided that these "threads" are called narrative codes,there are five codes:
Action codes:
Any action that implies a further narrative action E.g a gun fight
Enigma codes:
Refers to any element in a story that is not explained and therefore exists as an enigma for the audience, raising questions that demand explication.
The semantic code:
Any element in a text that suggests a particular, often additional meaning by way of connotation.
The culture code:
Any element in a narrative that refers "to a science or a body of knowledge." In other words, the cultural codes tend to point our shared knowledge of how the world works.