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Barthes

American

[bahrt, bart] / bɑrt, bært /

noun

Roland, 1915–80, French literary critic, philosopher, and semiotician.

Barthes British

/ bart /

noun

Roland . 1915–80, French writer and critic, who applied structuralist theory to literature and popular culture: his books include Mythologies (1957) and Elements of Semiology (1964)

"Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged" 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

“For me, color is an artifice,” the French philosopher Roland Barthes wrote in 1980.

From The Wall Street Journal • Nov. 21, 2025

“Irony does not involve the simple substitution of the opposite for the literal meaning,” said Barthes in "Elements of Semiology."

From Salon • Nov. 29, 2024

Barthes concludes, “but to conceive the inconceivable, i.e., to leave nothing outside the words and to concede nothing ineffable to the world.”

From Slate • Feb. 21, 2023

From the left, French essayist Roland Barthes dismissed the huge assembly of more than 500 photographs from 68 countries as “conventional humanism.”

From Los Angeles Times • Jul. 28, 2022

This peculiar blend is what Barthes was referring to when he described facts as linguistic yet claiming to be copies of the real.

From "The Invention of Science" by David Wootton

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023