Imaginary Myths: Roland Barthes and the Rhetorical Induction

The diffusion of contemporary myths is closely related to the iconic power of mainstream media, especially TV and cinema, in line with the representative impact of celebrity status. Daily narrations also deal with the educational effectiveness of exemplary people, as both exempla and myths still show their rhetorical and semiotic background, especially when considering the expressive and iconic paradigms of the mediascape. This is an aspect that Roland Barthes investigated in Mythologies (Barthes, 1957) and L’ancienne rhétorique (1970), with the aim of examining the rhetorical dynamics founding behind the construction of public exempla and imagoes. What is the difference between an exemplum and a myth? The former can be defined as a “rhetorical induction”, while the latter “is a type of speech”. The communicative implications of daily discourse concern not only our mainstream and digitalized skills but also our techniques of collective persuasion, in conjunction with the tendency to celebrate or stigmatize important men and women. While arguing that an exemplum is “a rhetorical induction”, Barthes dwells on the well-planned and often unconscious rhetorical techniques fuelling the sharing of new and old public exempla, because every inductive process includes interpretative, semiotic proficiency. Accordingly, the study of shared symbols and exempla can trigger a stronger expressive consciousness, in line with the rhetorical fluctuations of the media-sphere in which we communicate.