Five Codes of Barthes: A Post-structuralist Analysis of the novel The Colour of Our Sky by Amita Trasi

Abstract

Barthes’s five-code theory puts forward the idea of the reader as a producer of the text rather than its consumer. This typology of the codes, which constitutes plurality of the text, offers different meanings beyond the boundaries and limitations of the particular time and place. Thus, Barthes’ theoretical contribution is credited for rescuing the reading of fiction under the pressures of a local cultural to a more global orientation. Acknowledging the ‘rewriting’ of the text by readers, this paper adopts Barthes’ theory that includes proairetic, cultural, hermeneutic, semantic and symbolic codes, as an analytic method to examine the text The Colour of Our Sky written by Amita Trasi (2017) for the identification of what lies beyond the text, a network of collective socio-cultural norms that invokes complex modulations of meanings informed by the relations of discourse, power and subjectivity in different historical periods and in certain social and geographical spaces.