Roland Barthes - Key Terms

Key Terms

Readerly and writerly are terms Barthes employs both to delineate one type of literature from another and to implicitly interrogate ways of reading, like positive or negative habits the modern reader brings into one's experience with the text itself. These terms are most explicitly fleshed out in S/Z, while the essay "From Work to Text", from Image—Music—Text (1977) provides an analogous parallel look at the active and passive, postmodern and modern, ways of interacting with a text.