“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 ...

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 ...

Nearly three decades after he was hit and fatally injured by a laundry van in a Paris street, the French literary theorist and critic Roland Barthes still enjoys rare prestige in his native land as ...

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 ...

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 ...

Tiphaine Samoyault, trans. from the French by Andrew Brown. Polity, $39.95 (584p) ISBN 978-1-5095-0565-4 Samoyault, with the help of rare primary sources, brings to life Roland Barthes, a famous ...

Most of the time Roland Barthes is classified in the category of the 1970s intellectuals where all his fascinating singularity fades Our movie holds exactly to the desire of making perceptible his ...

There's a lot to say about what makes cars cool: They're fast, they serve a practical purpose, and they can be downright gorgeous. But the best explanation we've ever seen (and which we just came ...