Literary Criticism: Text Analysis beyond Rhetorics

It is traditionally maintained in the structuralist linguistics that by cutting verbal signs off each other paradigmatically, and enchaining some of them against some others syntagmatically, language system makes a body of text signify a certain meaning sustainable through contextual fluctuations. In line with this Saussurean assumption, and in an attempt to ascertain the authorial intent in a piece of great literary work, many literary scholars have been taking rhetorism for criticism, albeit under the rubrics of structural poetics. In this article, however, the abortive attempt to pull certain meanings out of chefs doeuvre is dismissed for the purpose of investigating the origins of textuality in any work – let it not be shelved as great literature or literary at all – to see why such mechanical procedures as prevalent in rhetorical studies cannot account for textuality beyond thematic unity of a work; wherein textuality and plurality of text are suppressed in favor of the integrity and entirety required for works of verbal art. As to account for the extensive significance of text and the abundance of its possible readings, a seemingly heterogeneous body of text (including a piece of a poem, an extract from an article, and a vignette) has been analyzed within a reader-oriented framework drawn upon Roland Barthes (1981), Asgari Pashaei (1995) and Christian Metz (1982) leading into a new impression of literary criticism far away from rhetorism.