Research On Ambiguity Theory Of William Empson

Based on William Empson’s book Seven Types of Ambiguity, this paper inspects the practice of Semantic Analysis Criticism. After we introduce the influence Empson got from T. S. Eliot and I. A. Richards, as well as the close relations of the counterparts both in terms of New Criticism and in Seven Types of Ambiguity, the importance of Empson’s Ambiguity theory in western literary criticism could be given prominence to.In addition, the paper also continues to study Empson’s following critic works. Especially it pays attention to the change of Empson. After the Semantic Analysis Criticism, he left the New Criticism behind and took a step on the practice with the application of text analysis. The text analysis method is applied to go through the internal and external research on literature. Thus, William Empson was transformed from a’New Criticism’enlightener to its opposite side-to reveal richness of literary works in a much wider field. Therefrom in Empson’s Ambiguity theory we could find that he did not want to initiate a new literary ontological criticism. On the contrary, he was trying to take this as the starting point to show the openness of literature.