ABSTRACT
One of the first arenas to emerge in the new climate of interpretation was the inner texture of a text. Before we begin to discuss this, however, it will be helpful to think for a moment about different ways of approaching texts for analysis and interpretation. This moment may help us as we proceed through the next four chapters, which analyze major arenas of texture in a text. Any broad-based interpretive approach contains at least two to three hundred strategies and techniques for analysis and interpretation. Socio-rhetorical criticism is no exception. Some are strategies that any human uses to investigate any kind of phenomenon in the world. Others are strategies humans use specifically to investigate written phenomena. Still others are strategies humans use to investigate religious phenomena. The list could continue with social, historical, cultural, aesthetic, ideological, psychological and still other phenomena. A major point in all of this is that no interpretive approach is entirely different from all others; no interpretive approach is entirely new. Every mode of analysis and interpretation is related somehow to others.
