This dissertation aimed to reflect the critics' stand on the phenomenon of the exordium (prefatory comments/remarks) as an important constituent and an essential part of a literary text. It, this study, tackled the works of the old and contemporary critics as well as their effort on examining the role of the "exordium" in clarifying the text. The study, further, focused closely on changes in Arab literary criticism, the impact of Arab culture on western culture and vice versa and the role of the modern approaches of literary criticism in reading the "exordium". Typically, the dissertation had a Preface, an Introduction, two parts, a Conclusion and Recommendations. In the Preface, the researcher went to reveal the stages, methodology and targets of his dissertation as well as other previous related theses. After expressing the reason why the exordium phenomenon was chosen to be the title of the dissertation, the Introduction conveyed the social and cultural milieu in which the phenomenon lived, worked, evolved (evolved as a vocabulary) and changed due to the change of the old and modern concepts thereof. Based on the exordium phenomenon in the Arabic cultural heritage, the First Part divided into two chapters. The First Chapter pointed out the position of critics and rhetoricians on the phenomenon and its relation to text, while the Second Chapter handled it (the phenomenon) in the Noble Qur'an, to wit: offering insights of the commentators and scholars of the Qur'anic studies of the past into such a phenomenon regarding the Qur'anic text and the phenomenon's role in divulging the underlying connotations in the Noble Qur'an. Then, the Second Part came to mirror the weightiest modern criticisms of such a phenomenon and its relation to text; this Part had a couple of chapters. From historical, psychological, semiotic, stylistic and (the methods of) Text-linguistics perspectives, the First Chapter entitled and argued "the modern critics' perspective on the exordium phenomenon concerning the poetic text." Too, relying on their approaches, the modern critics debated such a phenomenon regarding the novelistic text, in the Second Chapter; and the researcher went to afford the most central critical studies of the main exordiums of the novelistic text such as the title, preface and cover. In the hope that they would be taken into consideration, the dissertation, lastly, reached a conclusion and outcomes that might have been a positive contribution in this field.
