Textuality

Textuality refers to the qualities and features that make a piece of language function as a text rather than as random words. In literary theory and linguistics, it denotes the organization, coherence, and interpretive potential of a text as a unit of meaning. Textuality encompasses the surface features of language—syntax, vocabulary, and rhetoric—as well as the deeper structures that connect sentences and ideas across a passage.

Key components include textual structure (how a text is arranged: introduction, development, conclusion), cohesion and coherence (how sentences link and how ideas are maintained), and voice or style (tone, diction, and narrative perspective). Intertextuality, the way texts refer to or depend on other texts, is also central to textuality, highlighting that meaning often arises from relationships within a broader discourse.

The concept emphasizes that reading a text involves engagement with its conventions, genres, and implied readers. Textuality is dynamic: different readers or contexts can yield different interpretations, and a text may invite multiple readings depending on its openness and ambiguity. In practice, scholars analyze textuality to understand how texts produce meaning, sustain repetition and variation, and resist or enable interpretation.

Fields that discuss textuality include literary criticism, narratology, stylistics, and media studies; digital humanities also considers textuality in relation to digital editions, markup, and searchability. Overall, textuality centers on what makes a collection of signs function as a coherent, interpretable text within a cultural and linguistic system.