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• Title: Ambiguity, The Literary, And Close Reading (Essay)
• Author : CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
• Release Date : January 01, 2010
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 80 KB

Description

Directly or indirectly, literary ambiguity has been a subject of commentary and concern since Aristotle. Since the nineteenth century it has received more concerted attention, particularly with the advent of Symbolisme, stimulated by the re-framing of the question of the literary in Poe's "The Philosophy of Composition" (Poe passim), and reaching a key point in Mallarme's "Crise de vers." The matter was re-approached by the New Criticism in the early twentieth century, most notably in Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity, and taken to further levels with the coming of deconstruction. Making some use, in its later stages, of Jakobson's "Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics," the argument below is situated between the Symboliste, Empsonian, and Derridean positions. Attending primarily to the nature of ambiguity itself, it examines, by way of a consideration of close reading, the neglected question of the reader's desire and ability to perceive ambiguity, and then, via Jakobson, considers the "literary" as a matter of what "Art" adds, and what it is that may generate this essentially non- or asemantic cross-current in a text. There are many modes of literary ambiguity. Any attempt to define such a thing, as if it were a thing, will find itself either shutting out several others or dealing with many that it might not at first have intended to deal with. Even at the very outset we must consider that there are two terms to be addressed, separately, before we try to bring them together, but even this is a simplification. I shall approach the matter in two parts, examining firstly the question of textual ambiguity and its essential relation to reading, and then the manner in which this operates within and is further refined by the literary. We might say, for example, that ambiguity is inherent in the text, but even here we will have to determine at the outset whether what we mean is that it is an effect produced by certain tropes or textual practices, or whether it is somehow inherent in textuality itself. We might say, on the other hand, that ambiguity is an effect of reading, if for no other reason than that nothing can be known about a text until some attempt has been made to decipher it. But each of these avenues begs the question of the literary itself: whether by "literary" ambiguity we are referring merely to textual, as opposed to such other modes of ambiguity as the visual or the aural, or whether we are referring to modes of ambiguity particular to a certain kind of text, as opposed to other kinds. Do we need, for example, to consider at the outset where one mode of text--the "literary"--stops and other modes start?

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