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 ...

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 ...

Perhaps the best way to understand what drove Roland Barthes, then a thirty-nine-year-old professor of literature, to begin writing the series of short essays later published as “Mythologies” is to ...