Reading the Literary Text in Light of the Rhetorical Approach

Abstract

A literary text is a woven structure composed of a set of meaningful units and established concepts. It does not operate at the same level as the sentence, and it possesses a coherent and integrated semantic content. It is characterized by clarity and reflects the culture of society with all its complex networks across history and interpersonal relations; in other words, it is a condensed memory of the society’s cognitive system. It is a set of linguistic relations that serve an idea, or a group of ideas and concepts that are open to interpretation, explanation, and reinterpretation. This allows the text to be adapted to new readings or to reinforce an existing one.

Since rhetoric (balāgha) is concerned with how speech ought to be—its beautiful expression, its modes of performance, and its governing principles—its subject is the produced text. It studies its expressive and semantic values. Rhetoric is a literary art that refines taste, polishes emotion, and develops the aesthetic sensibility of the receiver. It is not among the abstract sciences that rely purely on reason or logical deduction; rather, its dominant feature is emotional and artistic. Therefore, it has a close relationship with literature, through which the aesthetic and artistic values of the text are revealed, and distinctions between expressions or between writers become evident.

Thus, rhetoric must go beyond the limits of the word or sentence toward a broader domain whose foundation is the text itself. In rhetorical tradition, it refers to the correspondence of speech to the requirements of context while maintaining eloquence. The rhetorical style is a linguistic-semantic structure, both direct and indirect, that carries functions of stimulation and aesthetic pleasure, alongside its communicative function of conveying ideas and information.

This raises several questions: How can we delve into the meanings of a literary text through the mechanisms of the rhetorical approach? What are the criteria for engaging with textual meanings within the Arabic rhetorical tradition? And is rhetoric alone sufficient for reading and interpreting literary texts?