Roland Barthes the French literary critic, theorist and philosopher died an absurd death. In 1980 he was hit by a laundry van in Paris, while walking home from a lunch given by François Mitterrand, ...

The day after his mother Henriette died in 1977 the French semiotician Roland Barthes began jotting down notes about his grief on slips of paper. “I know now that my mourning will be chaotic,” he ...

Hermès, the French luxury brand, has paid homage to the philosopher and semiotician Roland Barthes on the centennial of his birth, this November, by crafting a limited-edition silk scarf printed with ...

“Writing, at its best, is a lonely life,” Ernest Hemingway said in his 1954 Nobel Prize acceptance speech. “He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For ...

Perhaps the best way to understand what drove Roland Barthes, then a thirty-nine-year-old professor of literature, to begin writing the series of short essays later published as “Mythologies” is to ...

Ferdinand de Saussure defined semiology as “a science which studies the role of signs as part of social life.” We all practice it before we learn the word: High school drills it into us, if nothing ...

Paragraph, Vol. 31, No. 1, Roland Barthes Retroactively: Reading the Collège de France Lectures (March 2008), pp. 38-49 (12 pages) In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Barthes introduced ...

In 1967, French literary and cultural critic Roland Barthes published a short essay that would have far-reaching influence. Titled “The Death of the Author”, the essay argued that, for the purposes of ...

In memes, we find an overly literal embodiment of what Roland Barthes sees in any form of written expression. Once the post ...