Roland Barthes on Readerly And Writerly Texts

These two ideas are important for locating yourself in relationship to any "text." Today, on Columbus Day, the "text" that I am speaking of specifically is History. If my history isn't a writerly text, it's worthless. If I'm not a writerly text, I'm not doing the work required of me as a thinker.

Readerly Text

A text that makes no requirement of the reader to "write" or "produce" his or her own meanings. The reader may passively locate "ready-made" meaning. Barthes writes that these sorts of text are "controlled by the principle of non-contradiction," 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." Within this category, there is a spectrum of "replete literature," which comprises "any classic (readerly) texts" that work "like a cupboard where meanings are shelved, stacked, safeguarded"


Writerly Text

A text that aspires to the proper goal of literature and criticism: "... to make the reader no longer a consumer but a producer of the text." Writerly texts and ways of reading constitute, in short, an active rather than passive way of interacting with a culture and its texts. A culture and its texts, Barthes writes, should never be accepted in their 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." Thus reading becomes for Barthes "not a parasitical act, the reactive complement of a writing," but rather a "form of work."