Introduction: Demythologizing the Occupation

Demythologizing the Occupation 

In Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957), a work often considered one of the founding texts of the hydra-headed discipline of “Cultural Studies,” Roland Barthes observed that myth-making invariably entails the “theft of language” (217). In striving to transform “history into nature,” he explains, myth makes off with meanings, constricts and contorts their form, only to restore them as pale, normative versions of their former selves. In the wake of this linguistic thievery, Barthes laments, a culture’s sign systems are stripped of their connotative riches and divested of their contestatory potential, leaving the political and historical truths that one can tell about a society strictly curtailed, sadly impoverished (217-233).