Reading Literary Texts: The Convergence of Linguistic Methods and Literary approaches.The texture of literary language has drawn the attention of theorists into its operations. A lot has been written on the linguistic analysis of literature at the level of "the sentence-only"approaches. Literary texts are, however, should not be limited to their formal properties if the purpose is to "make sense out of" literature. Rather, more investments have to be encouraged in the consideration of the contextual analysis of literary texts. To achieve this purpose, the analysis has to be underpinned by resources from a few but translatable analytic frameworks and categories. Having said that, the "politics of genre" through SFL and NRS (New Rhetoric Studies), speech act theory and pragmatics, appraisal system, discursive strategies,Fairclough's CDA could be incorporated within critical literary approaches to have not only an interdisciplinary contribution but also an integrated understanding of the textual and contextual properties of the literary texts. In fact, an enhanced understanding of literary texts requires the convergence of methods and theoretical lenses which could not be provided by either critical literary approaches or non- critical literary approaches alone.The present research attempts to apply the above-mentioned mixed analysis to three literary works, namely, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (1949) and Tony Morrison's The Bluest Eye (1970) and Sula (1973) to assess the degree of the contribution of the tentative approach above to the understanding of the literary texts within their relevant socio-pragmatic spaces. 1 Assistance Professor of English Literature, Department of English, University of Kurdistan,rajabi.e.sh@gmail.com
