The very title of Roland Barthes’s book “Mythologies,” which just came out in a new translation by Richard Howard and Annette Lavers, is a misnomer. There’s nothing of Sisyphus or Oedipus in the fifty ...

On October 26, 1977, the day after his mother died, French philosopher and literary theorist Roland Barthes began the “Mourning Diary”—a series of reflections written on small pieces of paper the size ...

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, ...