is a word from the French for 'legible' used to denote a text that requires no true participation from its audience. It was first coined by the French literary critic

Roland Barthes Roland Gérard Barthes (; ; 12 November 1915 – 25 March 1980) was a French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. His work engaged in the analysis of a variety of sign systems, mainly derived from Western popu ...

in his book '' S/Z'' and expanded from his essay "

The Death of the Author "The Death of the Author" () is a 1967 essay by the French people, French literary critic and Literary theory, theorist Roland Barthes (1915–1980). Barthes' essay argues against traditional literary criticism's practice of relying on the author ...

". Barthes contrasts , denoting a closed work, with , a text open to interpretation. In Barthes's opinion, works provide no challenge to the reader's preconceived notions and thus are inferior to scriptible works, exemplified by modernist literature. Barthes contends that lisible works still emphasize the importance of the author, whereas for scriptible texts "the reader is the very space in which are inscribed, without any being lost, all the citations a writing consists of; the unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination."

References

Literary criticism {{lit-criticism-stub