Stratum Stylistics: Contextual Description and Determination of Style in Lexical and Rhetorical Strata

Stratum Stylistics through focusing on situational context as macro-stratum, dissects the text into micro strata to be studied in detail. While in traditional stylistics the unit of analysis is “sentence”, in stratum stylistics not only the whole text is taken into account, but the area of analysis goes as far as considering the stylistic features of the writer, genre and period as well as ideology and the secret power relations. This paper tries to adopt this approach in reading Letter No. 1 by Imam Mohammad Ghazzāli in order to scrutinize its lexical and rhetorical strata