The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

238 Texture
depend on the ambiguity of its contents,
but rather on what could be called the
stereographic plurality of the signifiers
that weave it.’ The Text is ‘completely
woven with quotations, references and
echoes’. (5) ‘The Text...is read without
the father’s signature.’ The author can
only come back to the text as ‘a guest’ so
to speak. ‘The Text can be read without its
father’s guarantee: the restitution of the
intertext paradoxically abolishes the concept
of filiation’ (p. 78). So, a text read in
the weave of texts no longer is anchored
in the author. (6) The Text ‘asks the reader
for an active collaboration’. The reader
thus should produce the Text. (7) ‘The
Text is linked to enjoyment.’ In brief,
Barthes sees the work as ‘closed’ and the
text as ‘open’. Many literary critics have
subsequently been influenced by the work
of Foucault and Derrida on the status and
composition of both text and the text.
See also TEXTURE.
See Edward Said, The World, the Text
and the Critic (1991); Stanley Fish, Is
There a Text in This Class? (1980); Roland
Barthes, ‘From work to text’ in Josue V.
Harari (ed.), Textual Strategies (1979);
Geoffrey Hartman, Saving the Text (1983).
AAAC
Texture Strictly, the word texture
when applied to language, describes the
tactile images employed to represent various
physical surfaces, but by extension
has come to mean the representation in
words of all physical phenomena. The
widespread use of the term is based on the
assumption that words have an expressive
or simulative aspect which helps to illustrate
their meanings more immediately.
This belief in the onomatopoeic properties
of language has not always gone
unchallenged, but the existence of techniques
for producing particular sensory
effects in the reader is undisputed, and it
is thus possible to describe the texture of
language in terms of either of the means
used or the effects obtained. Assonance
(identity of vowel sounds), consonance
(identity of consonant sounds) and alliteration
(repetition of initial consonants)
may each be used to produce such effects
as cacophony (a sense of strain in pronunciation)
or euphony (a sense of ease in
pronunciation). All are exemplified in
Alexander Pope’s famous exercise ‘An
Essay in Criticism’:
When Ajax strives some rock’s vast
weight to throw,
The line too labours, and the words
move slow;
Not so when swift Camilla scours the
plain,
Flie o’er th’unbending corn, and skims
along the main.
Samuel Johnson, however, attempting to
prove that the mind governs the ear and
not the reverse, quotes more lines with
similar textural qualities and demonstrates
quite convincingly that not even
‘the greatest master of numbers can fix
the principles of representative harmony’
(Life of Pope, 1779).
Many other critical theorists from
Aristotle to I. A. Richards have disputed
the possibility of any natural connection
between the sounds of any language,
and the things signified. Richards in The
Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936) asks:
what resemblance or natural connection
can there be between the semantic
and phonetic elements in the morpheme?
One is a sound the other a
reference. Is (fl-) {in flicker, flash,
flare} really like ‘moving light’ in any
way in which (si-) or (gi-) is not? Is
that not like asking whether the taste
of turkey is like growing in some way
that the taste of mint is not?