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

Of this lineup of serial offenders, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty had prior convictions, mostly for communism, and only Barthes had a sense of humor.

From The Wall Street Journal • Dec. 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

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