Readerly and Writerly

Taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barthes

Readerly Text: Both the "readerly" and "writerly" are ways of reading which Barthes implicitly interrogates throughout his texts; "S/Z", however, is perhaps the best and most explicit text in terms of watching how these definitions are fleshed out ("From Work to Text," an essay from "Image--Music--Text" (1977) also serves as a great analogous parallel look at the active and passive, postmodern and modern, ways of interacting with a text). As has already been implied, it is important to note that the "readerly" and "writerly" are more like positive or negative habits by which the modern reader brings with him or her to texts themselves. Regardless, there remains a spectrum of literature Barthes terms "Replete Literature," which are "any classic (readerly) texts that" work "like a cupboard where meanings are shelved, stacked, [and] safeguarded" (S/Z p.200). A readerly text, in other words, is one wherein the reader need not "write" or "produce" his or her own meanings but one where one can find, by passive means, meaning "ready-made". In another variation upon the "readerly," Barthes writes that these sorts of text are "controlled by the principle of non-contradiction" (156), that is, they do not disturb the "common sense," or "Doxa," of the surrounding culture. The "readerly texts," moreover, "are products [that] make up the enormous mass of our literature" (5).

Writerly Text: Unlike the required passivity before the readerly text, i.e. one which is "replete" with meanings already easily discernable, the goal of any "writerly text" for Barthes is the proper goal of literature and criticism: "...the goal is to make the reader no longer a consumer but a producer of the text" (4). "Writerly texts" and ways of reading are, in short, an active rather than passive way of interacting with a culture and its texts that Barthes implies should never be accepted in its given forms and traditions. As opposed to the "readerly texts" as "product," the "Writerly text is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system (Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages" (5). In the end, for Barthes reading "is not a parasitical act, the reactive complement of a writing," but rather a "form of work" (10).

Barthes, Roland. S/Z: An Essay. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974.