Special & Digital Collections - VIC 110 - Critical Perspectives on Society

University of Toronto's Special Collections

The following links are from Victoria University's digital special collections. They will give you some context to France in 20th century that may contextualize the time period Barthes and Baudrillard were writing and were influenced by.

Select Paris Posters Digitized

Paris Photographs

Paris Documents

Paris Magazines

Other Digital Collections and Resources

Jones, Josh. "An Animated Introduction to Roland Barthes’s Mythologies and How He Used Semiotics to Decode Popular Culture." Current Affairs, Philosophy, Politics. 4 April 2017, Accessed 27 September 2022.
"The video above from educational company Macat offers a more formal summary of Barthes’ Mythologies. The French critic and semiotician made significant contributions to literary and critical theory, demonstrating—with the wide-ranging wit and erudition of his humanist countryman Michel de Montaigne—how “dominant ideologies successfully present themselves as simply the way the world should be.” Looking back on his book over twenty years later, after the events in Paris of May 1968, Barthes remarked that the need for “ideological criticism” had been “again made brutally evident.” Indeed, we have ample reason to think that, over sixty years since Barthes published his classic analysis, the need for a rigorously critical view of mass media, advertising, and political spectacle has become more pressing than ever."
Hannah Arendt Papers
The papers of author, educator, political philosopher, and public intellectual Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) constitute a large and diverse collection (25,000 items; 82,597 images) reflecting a complex career. The collection spans the years 1898 to 1977, with the bulk of the material beginning in 1948, three years before Arendt’s naturalization as an American citizen. The papers contain correspondence, articles, lectures, speeches, book manuscripts, transcripts of Adolf Eichmann’s trial proceedings, notes, printed matter pertaining to Arendt’s writings, family and personal materials, evidence of Arendt’s network of fellow intellectuals, editors, writers, and theorists, and documentation of her academic affiliations and courses taught.

The Library of Congress received the Hannah Arendt Papers as a gift and bequest from Arendt in various installments from 1965 to 2000. Small additions have been subsequently received, including those made by Klaus Loewald in 1981, Roger Errera in 1994, and Jochen Kölsch, International Verbindungen, 2007.