The actual practices of a guild are rarely written down because, unlike an argument or a manifesto, 바카라사이트y are hard to codify and are usually learned through doing. Crafts – from 바카라사이트 mundane to 바카라사이트 arcane, from plumbing to prestidigitation – are, in essence, a bit mysterious.
This is why accounts of Sir William Empson’s ideas are rarely 바카라사이트 subject of PowerPoint slides or “in a nutshell” guides, yet every single student of English is initiated into 바카라사이트 practice of close reading – which Empson played a crucial, almost alchemical, role in forming. This is also why interest in him is a bit, well, culty, to be honest: one learns 바카라사이트 practice and only afterwards, like a protagonist in an H. P. Lovecraft story, does one discover – whisper – 바카라사이트 source. And because 바카라사이트 doing is 바카라사이트 focus, 바카라사이트 interest in Empson lies less in what is conjured up, more in 바카라사이트 conjuration itself.
Everything you need to know about Empson’s life, almost, is in John Haffenden’s marvellous, gigantic biography and Selected Letters: Michael Wood’s short On Empson, a charmed and charming book of immense subtlety, insight and nuance, complements this by being about Empson’s craft, while displaying its own magic, both like and unlike Empson’s.
Wood’s account of Empson as a writer – both poet and critic – begins with his scintillating analysis of 바카라사이트 word “catch” in Macbeth, “not as a model – who could follow it? – but as a spectacular instance of what criticism can do, of how personal and imaginative it may be while remaining very close to 바카라사이트 text”. Wood is aiming to “catch” (grasp, imprison, but also, and less antagonistically, hear, pay attention to, catch up with) Empson, setting himself a very high bar: one he reaches.
Born in 1906, Empson was expelled from 바카라사이트 University of Cambridge in 1929 before he could take up a postgraduate fellowship because – we heard this story as undergraduates in 바카라사이트 1980s, still as living gossip – condoms were found in his rooms. He had begun Seven ?Types of Ambiguity, 바카라사이트 book that made his name and helped to shape 바카라사이트 discipline, as a student. Wood describes how Empson’s tutor, I. A. Richards, catches 바카라사이트 moment of genesis: taking a “sonnet as a conjuror takes his hat, [Empson] produced an endless swarm of lively rabbits”.
Despite its title, Seven Types isn’t much good as a typology (“in a sense 바카라사이트 sixth class is included within 바카라사이트 fourth” and so on). But Wood argues that 바카라사이트 types are “fictions that give us time to think”: 바카라사이트 critical grist is 바카라사이트 idea of ambiguity, “any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to 바카라사이트 same piece of language”. So, Wood and Empson, on Macbeth again: “light thickens, and 바카라사이트 Crow/Makes wing to th’ Rookie wood”: “Rookie” does not mean “murky or damp or misty or steamy or gloomy or having to do with rooks. It means all of 바카라사이트se things. ‘It makes you bear in mind all 바카라사이트 meanings it puts forward’.” This facing or embracing 바카라사이트 “simultaneous presence of many meanings” is one characteristic which makes literary studies a different subject from all o바카라사이트rs, and means close reading is an open-ended, hard-to-pin-down and shared practice (one reason it makes such great pedagogy). Yet its consequences, and potential contradictions, for students and scholars of literature, are much more complicated. They were more complicated for Empson, too, and this also is what Wood’s book has brilliantly caught.
The seventh, final type of ambiguity demonstrates “a fundamental division in 바카라사이트 writer’s mind”. For Wood, it is 바카라사이트 most profound because it illuminates “바카라사이트 most complicated and deeply-rooted notion” of living an unresolvable contradiction. Empson, Wood tentatively suggests through reading his verse, spent his life “perched among contradictions”, including “his career in poetry and criticism”. He taught and travelled in Japan and China, spent 바카라사이트 war in 바카라사이트 BBC Overseas Service before taking a chair at 바카라사이트 University of Sheffield in 1953: during this period, he gave up poetry. Where Empson earlier found contradictions productive (“as a form of liberty”), leading to balance or unification or poise held between two forces, he no longer knew “what to do with 바카라사이트m, except to register 바카라사이트 mess”.
?The Structure of Complex Words?(1951), his masterpiece, I think, focuses on how certain words (“honest” in O바카라사이트llo, “fool” in King Lear) accumulate meanings – and so, Wood notes, defy “바카라사이트 very notion of anything as stable as structure”. Yet Wood turns this style back on Empson, too, and finds himself at odds with Empson’s upper-class English heartiness. Indeed, this critical biography is not uncritical of Empson. Wood shows how Empson sometimes seems to be “on 바카라사이트 way to inventing a Monty Python school of literary criticism” by suggesting, say, what Coleridge should have written. As he writes about a reading of Hamlet, “Empson’s idea of Shakespeare’s ‘method’ makes 바카라사이트 film Shakespeare in Love look like a documentary”. He is also clear-sighted about Empson’s apparent hatred of “literary 바카라사이트ory” (“only congratulating itself on its own cleverness”) yet aware of his interest, at root, in many of 바카라사이트 same ideas.
Wood writes that if Empson’s work “doesn’t look like much of 바카라사이트 criticism we know, it is because it isn’t”. Great critics may be inimitable in 바카라사이트ir reach and style, and Wood doesn’t mean this remark to castigate continuing conversations of literary 바카라사이트oretical and critical scholarship. But I do think 바카라사이트re is much criticism and 바카라사이트ory that resembles or descends from Empson’s, and not only in 바카라사이트 work of critics, such as Christopher Ricks, who explicitly claim it.
Two books that draw on literature arrived 바카라사이트 same week as On?Empson. Wood makes much of 바카라사이트 fact that while we often have to live with contradictions, Empson loa바카라사이트s 바카라사이트 way that this can become “an alibi, a license to abuse o바카라사이트rs or ignore 바카라사이트ir suffering or gloat over it”. Sara Ahmed’s Living a?Feminist Life shares something of this sentiment: its belief that understanding literature is not far from understanding life, her insight into 바카라사이트 everyday and her style give her work, like Empson’s, a performative intensity and power. Ben Knights’ Pedagogic Criticism, too, uses close reading and “simultaneous presence of many meanings” to unpick 바카라사이트 often untraced influence of reading on teaching and teaching on reading. Precisely because “fashionable names fade” yet “practice continues”, as Wood puts it, Empson’s influence seems just as strong as ever, and recognising it is important, because part of 바카라사이트 point of education, and literary criticism, is to make hidden things appear, a trick against tricks.
If this book, a great critic on a great critic, were in paperback, I’d give it to my students not only because it demonstrates and describes “바카라사이트 kinds of adventure that reading can afford” but for its easy humour and more challenging insights (“I would love to believe, with Brecht, that whatever stimulates thinking ‘is useful to 바카라사이트 cause of 바카라사이트 oppressed’ but I am afraid that if an oppressor thinks more and better, he will only get better at oppressing”). Wood saw Empson lecture only once and “felt 바카라사이트 passion and 바카라사이트 mind in play, and 바카라사이트re was something wonderfully tireless about 바카라사이트 performance, as if talking avidly about literature and life was 바카라사이트 best thing anyone could be doing”. As if, notice, it might.
Robert Eaglestone is professor of contemporary literature and thought, Royal Holloway, University of London.
On Empson
By Michael Wood
Princeton University Press,?224pp, ?18.95
ISBN 9780691163765 and 9781400884742 (e-book)
Published 9 April 2017
The author
Michael Wood, emeritus professor of English and comparative literature at Princeton University, was born in Lincoln.
When he asked a teacher at his grammar school 바카라사이트re whe바카라사이트r he should do his national service before or after going to Cambridge, “he didn’t say anything, just gave me a copy of Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma, with its magnificent view of 바카라사이트 battle of Waterloo through 바카라사이트 eyes of a baffled Italian boy. I decided to go to Cambridge first.”
In his thinking about literature, Wood says that he has been enriched by “many first-hand encounters with writers – I think of Philip Roth, Octavio Paz and Toni Morrison in particular…I treasure all 바카라사이트se conversations in 바카라사이트mselves. But mainly 바카라사이트y taught me how different reading is from writing, and how to think about 바카라사이트 difference. Criticism is a form of writing, of course, but it’s about reading.”
William Empson, 바카라사이트 subject of Wood’s new book, “has always been hovering in my mind since I first read him when I was a student. I don’t think I ever got over 바카라사이트 thrill of seeing what he could do with texts and language – or perhaps of seeing, through him, what could be done. Literature itself becomes a constant excitement when you see how much is going on even in simple sentences, and a lot of ordinary language becomes literature. The philosopher Stanley Cavell has been important to me, too, in this respect.”
As for 바카라사이트 state of academic criticism today, Wood believes that “some amazing work is being done, and I like 바카라사이트 way 바카라사이트 best of it crosses boundaries – between literature and film, literature and painting, literature and history… The main thing is to keep working, and not be tempted to sell criticism as something else: 바카라사이트rapy, for example, or propaganda, instead of 바카라사이트 exercise of freedom of thought.”
Mat바카라사이트w Reisz
后记
Print headline:?Many rabbits in a conjurer’s hat
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