Cohesion in Artificial Prose and the Role of Rhetorical Devices in its Creation

This study aims to investigate cohesion, cohesive elements, and the plausible cohesive role of rhetorics in Persian esoteric prose literature. The cohesion of a given text depends on some factors within the text that use structural and semantic links to create text integrity. It seems that rhetorical devices, like simile and metaphor, along with linguistic factors, affect the cohesion of the esoteric prose texts.In the study of the sample esoteric prose texts that have been chosen randomly, the number of the existing cohesive devices, their distribution and the role of each structural cohesive device in maintaining links among the parts of the text were analyzed on the basis ofHalliday and Hasan’s approach. Then the role of rhetorical devices, like simile and metaphor, in creating semantic links, and consequently in giving cohesion to the texts,was studied.The results show that in esoteric prose texts, besides the structural cohesive elements, rhetorical devices,such as simile, metaphor, and especially allegory and compound metaphor that are manifested at the discursive level, i.e. beyond the level of sentence, also play a role in maintaining links among the parts of the texts and hence in the cohesion of the texts.