Unity as Community: Empson’s Poetic Skepticism in Seven Types of Ambiguity

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This paper purports to investigate William Empson’s poetics of ambiguity represented in Seven Types of Ambiguity, framing it as “poetic skepticism.” To do so, it pays attention to a few critical occasions that he deals with certain types of ambiguity in the poems of Shakespeare, Richard Crashaw, and George Herbert via the suspension of judgment (epoché), bound to the equilibrium of hidden meanings (isosothenia). Empson’s poetic skepticism illuminates poetry’s natural predilection for the proliferation of meanings that fends off any dogmatic assertion of impetuous judgment and unitary interpretation. Empson’s rival critics have often criticized its strenuous elicitation of open-mindedness, intellectual freedom, and epistemological modesty for propagating interpretive anarchy or even semantic nihilism. As opposed to this view, the paper explores how Empson’s poetic skepticism brings about a sense of unity, while defining it as a broad, open-ended semantic community that accommodates contradictions and disjunctions entailed by poetry. Empson’s distinctive critical approach testifies that all poems are inherently associated with skepticism, as they demand the suspension of judgment for its cornucorpian substance and its resistance to dogmatism.

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