27Percent, Readerly vs. Writerly

After today's class, the writerly and readerly text was made more clear for me. I have an understanding that the writerly text is what the author intends for the reader to make sense of and the readerly text is what the reader interprets from that text. Perspectives of the text are made by the reader, which also has to do with Barthes concept of perversion that we spoke about in today's class. Perversion is what we bring to the text, how something happens between the writer and the reader that causes something pleasureable. The example we looked at today in class was JK Rowling's book series of Harry Potter and the description of Hogwarts and its intertextuality of how the movies and theme parks depicted it compared to what the reader imagined. This is where Barthes concept of tmesis also plays a large role. Since authors do not say everything, there is always more that can be said and this is the unspoken. That's where critical media and cultural studies majors shine, when they must analyze text critically and fill in these gaps of the unspoken from experience.