ABSTRACT
When we look at a thick tapestry from different angles, we see different configurations, patterns and images. Likewise, when we explore a text from different angles, we see multiple textures of meanings, convictions, beliefs, values, emotions and actions. These textures within texts are a result of webs or networks of meanings and meaning effects that humans create. One person has explained in the following manner how the term ‘text’ itself signifies these networks or webs:
Writing and the texts produced by writing are, from the first, expressions of a metaphor of figuration as ‘weaving’. The word ‘text’ itself derives from Latin texere (‘to weave’) and we still speak of weaving or ‘stitching together’ (cf. rhapsode, ‘stitch together’) a discourse in which the ‘seams’ are not obvious, or one that makes a ‘seamless web’. This weaving metaphor occurs in story after story as a symbol of order, and order itself is another weaving metaphor, derived from Latin ordo, a technical term for the arrangement of threads in the warp and woof of a fabric. And, do we not still speak of the ‘fabric’ of a tale, the ‘thread of discourse’, or words as the ‘clothing of thought’, of the ‘network’ of ideas in a text, and of ‘spinning a yarn’, which others may ‘unravel’?
