نقد ادبی: از تأویل اثر تا تحلیل متن

It is traditionally maintained in structural linguistics that by cutting verbal signs off each other paradigmatically, and enchaining some of them against the others syntagmatically, language system makes a body of text signify a certain meaning which is sustainable through contextual fluctuations. In line with this Saussurian assumption, and in an attempt to ascertain the authorial intention in literary works, many literary scholars have been mistaken rhetorics for criticism, albeit under the rubrics of structural poetics. This article, however, dismisses the futile attempt to pull certain meanings out of literary masterpiecesfor the purpose of investigating the origins of textuality in any work—let it not be shelved as great literature or literary at all. It aims to demonstrate why such mechanical procedures, prevalent in rhetorical studies, cannot account for textuality beyond the question of the 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. To account for the extensive significance of text and the abundance of its possible readings, a seemingly heterogeneous body of texts (including a piece of a poem, an extract from an article, and a vignette) has been analyzed within a reader-oriented framework. Drawing on Roland Barthes (1981), Asgari Pashaei (1995) and Christian Metz (1982), I have tried to move away from rhetorics toward a more proper notion of literary criticism.