A Study Of William Empson's Seven Types Of Ambiguity

William Empson, a 20^th century British poet and critic, is perhaps the most famous and least understood of all modern critics, as Christopher Norris has aptly put it. In China, Empson is generally considered to be a new critic, and his first and most influential critical book, Seven Types of Ambiguity, a model of new criticism's close reading and semantic analysis. However, this widely held opinion, both of him and his work, is far from being the truth, and for a large part, a rather damaging one.This thesis tries to dispel this prevailing misunderstanding of his first critical book through analysis in the following four aspects: first, background information on the writing of this book, with special attention to Empson's academic background in science and mathematics; second, detailed analysis of the seven types of ambiguity and their connections; third, three layers of ambiguity and verbal analysis, namely, the poetic text, the reader's understanding, and the poet's psychology, with emphasis on the verbal analysis; fourth, the book's influence on later literary criticism.The thesis concludes that the Empsonian ambiguity is not a verbal or rhetorical trick, but a way of understanding literature through consideration of the grammatical and logical ambiguity in the text itself, the ambiguous possibilities of the reader's understanding, and the conscious and unconscious ambiguity of the writer's intention, that the Empsonian verbal analysis discusses how a particular literary effect is produced, analyzes various possible meanings in the reader's full response to the literary text, and thus enhances the reader's understanding of his own pleasure acquired during his reading.