Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

(usual translations of French scriptible and lisible.) A pair of terms introduced by Roland B arthes in his book S/Z, a brilliant and meticulous (almost sentence-by-sentence) close reading of Balzac's novella Sarrasine . The readerly, or “classic realist,” T ext is one that observes all those cultural C odes and conventions which the reader expects of a well-made narrative. It can thus be consumed (so to speak) without remainder as a piece of straightforward mimetic D iscourse whose fictive or textual status is forgotten for the sake of just enjoying the story or following the fortunes of its various protagonists. The writerly text, on the other hand, is one that permits of no such easy escape route into the naive pleasures of that realist illusion which Barthes identifies with the workings of bourgeois I deology . It is the kind of text that resists mere passive consumption – or which holds out against those conformist habits of response – by refusing the reader a stable, self-assured subject position from which he or she can share in the author's omniscient view of characters and events. This it does by disrupting those various narrative codes (the proairetic, hermeneutic, semic, cultural, and symbolic) which weave and intersect at every point in the text and whose breakdown generates a “scandal” in the naturalized order of meaning and representation. At the limit such ... log in or subscribe to read full text