Argufying (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: William Empson
- First Published: 1988
- Type of Work: Literary and cultural criticism
- Genres: Criticism, Nonfiction, Essays
- Subjects: Culture, Literature, Literary criticism
The late William Empson is probably still best known for one of his early books, Seven Types of Ambiguity: A Study of Its Effects on English Verse (1930), a classic of literary criticism. Empson was a self-described practitioner of verbal analysis. As another of his titles, The Structure of Complex Words (1951), suggests, what mattered to him most was the meanings of words and the contexts in which words are interpreted. He has sometimes been accused of being too ingenious in his interpretations of words, of finding too much significance in a writer's word selection. He...
[The entire page is 1971 words long]
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