ABSTRACT
In our hyper-literate world, argued interpretations of texts can have profound effects on our individual and collective lives. Most approaches to textual interpretation take as their starting place assumptions about how a particular text type should be interpreted. In contrast, the author adopts a rhetorical approach that broadly surveys the language features people use as persuasive resources to support arguments about the meaning of any text type. Specifically, this chapter is guided by a theory of general, recurring issues that can occur in disagreements over textual meaning, the interpretive stases, first described by ancient rhetoricians in Greece and Rome as part of a larger body of observation and advice known as stasis theory. The author employs the interpretive stases as an outline of the kinds of textual evidence that can support claims about the meaning of a text, namely words, sentences, and passages, whose evidentiary nature can be further extended through inferential readings and arguments about intention. In addition, the author discusses the preliminary issue of establishing a text for interpretation, reviews common argument strategies for supporting interpretive claims, and observes that certain words, sentences, and passages can govern the meaning of the rest of a text.
