Barthes

American  

[bahrt, bart] / bɑrt, bært /

noun

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

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Barthes British  

/ bart /

noun

1. 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)

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Example Sentences

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

From The Wall Street Journal • Nov. 21, 2025

Between Barthes and Berlant, Alanis gets to have the black fly in her chardonnay and drink it, too.

From Salon • Nov. 29, 2024

The title of Briggs’ second book is also a reference to Barthes, whose work she has translated, and who called the novel “the long form.”

From Los Angeles Times • Oct. 4, 2023

I was reminded of the observation of Roland Barthes, the French philosopher, that in every old photograph lurks catastrophe.

From New York Times • Aug. 6, 2023

The purpose of such irrelevant details—the pewter plates, the glorious eggs—is to create what Roland Barthes called ‘the reality effect’.

From "The Invention of Science" by David Wootton