DOCSLIB.ORG

Milton Studies and Surprised by Sin Cecile M

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Milton Studies and Surprised by Sin Cecile M Against the Grain Volume 25 | Issue 6 Article 41 2013 Collecting to the Core--Milton Studies and Surprised by Sin Cecile M. Jagodzinski Resources for College Libraries, [email protected] Anne Doherty CHOICE/ACRL, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/atg Part of the Library and Information Science Commons Recommended Citation Jagodzinski, Cecile M. and Doherty, Anne (2013) "Collecting to the Core--Milton Studies and Surprised by Sin," Against the Grain: Vol. 25: Iss. 6, Article 41. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7771/2380-176X.7436 This document has been made available through Purdue e-Pubs, a service of the Purdue University Libraries. Please contact [email protected] for additional information. Order from the online library specialists Find more titles, get better service, build stronger collections Find it » Get it » Build it » More than hard-to-nd Put our library team Individual titles or match and out-of-print to work to help you hundreds on your want list Inventory of 140 Payment options, Replacement projects million books including purchase orders New and used items Consolidated, free, and Retrospective collection discounted shipping development Out-of-stock items from Talk to a real person Use online tools or have publisher or elsewhere Alibris order for you SPECIAL OFFER VISIT: www.alibris.com/library RECEIVE $15 OFF YOUR NEXT ORDER OF $100 OR MORE! CALL: 1-877-ALIBRIS USE COUPON CODE ATGJAN AT CHECKOUT EXPIRES FEBRUARY 28, 2014 EMAIL: [email protected] Collecting to the Core — Milton Studies and Surprised by Sin by Cecile M. Jagodzinski (British Literature Editor, Resources for College Libraries) <[email protected]> Column Editor: Anne Doherty (Resources for College Libraries Project Editor, CHOICE/ACRL) <[email protected]> Column Editor’s Note: The “Collecting speare, of course, but what about John Don- and 1674.2 It was published after the Res- to the Core” column highlights monographic ne, Edmund Spenser, Samuel Johnson, toration of the monarchy in England, fol- works that are essential to the academic li- Jane Austen, the Brontës, the Brownings, lowing years of civil war — years in which brary within a particular discipline, inspired Charles Dickens, and, of more recent vin- Milton stood on the side of the republicans by the Resources for College Libraries bib- tage, James Joyce, Nobel laureate Seamus as a prolific author of pamphlets opposing liography (online at http://www.rclweb.net). Heaney, or winners of the Man Booker Charles I and the royalists. Especially after In each essay, subject specialists introduce award? In order to escape the burden of such the publication of the fourth edition of Para- and explain the classic titles and topics that a choice, I am proposing a single core title, dise Lost, Milton was “known and celebrated continue to remain relevant to the undergrad- along with its associated referents, that has in England as the author of the national uate curriculum and library collection. Dis- had a profound influence onMilton studies: Protestant epic.”3 The poem was regarded ciplinary trends may shift, but some classics Stanley Fish’s Surprised by Sin: The Reader as a work of supreme sublimity, notable for never go out of style. — AD in Paradise Lost.1 Not only did this critical its aesthetics as well as its Christian mor- work change the way scholars thought about alism. Several positive critical appraisals, eaders, I hope, will pardon the cli- John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost; it commentaries, and explanations of the work ché, but writing on core monographs illustrates the way in which the critical tradi- appeared in the eighteenth century. in British literature, from the Old tion in literature evolves, and, more broadly, The critical winds shifted with the rise of R how scholarship operates as a conversation English period through the twenty-first cen- the Romantic movement in the nineteenth tury, provides one with an embarrassment between and among scholars. century. For William Blake and Percy of riches. Which period best represents the In order to set Fish’s work into its Bysshe Shelley, the poem’s key figure was strength and influence of British literature proper context, a brief history of the criti- not Adam, Eve, or God the Father or the Son, on literature as a whole, or on the literatures cal reception to Paradise Lost is in order. but Satan himself. Shelley, in the preface to of other parts of the globe? Which authors It was first published in 1667, with later his Prometheus Unbound, invokes Milton should one regard as preeminent? Shake- seventeenth-century editions in 1668, 1669, continued on page 70 Against the Grain / December 2013 - January 2014 <http://www.against-the-grain.com> 69 Milton’s poetry doesn’t mean very much.”10 notes that Eve’s “wanton” hair is not to be Collecting to the Core Ricks, who goes on to defend Milton and his taken as an indication of a predilection toward from page 69 poem, classifies the charges against Milton sin; we only read it that way because our fallen as misreadings and faults attributable to the natures cannot rightfully interpret “prelapsari- as “the inheritor of a republican tradition in poem’s stylistics.11 an vocabulary.” Fish also answers those who poetry” whose leaders, a new generation of C. S. Lewis was one of the few critics regard Satan as the hero of the poem; in one poets, sought to overcome tyranny. In A De- who countered the anti-Miltonists in his chapter, he distinguishes between Satan’s fence of Poetry, Shelley regards Satan as “the seminal work A Preface to Paradise Lost.12 “epic heroism” and true Christian heroism. Hero of Paradise Lost” because of the devil’s Immediate responses to Fish’s work were 4 His arguments became “dominant in Milton sheer “energy and magnificence.” The most scholarship” and contributed to a critical mixed. Rosalie Colie, in a review of the book, influential of the Romantics in the history of shift in readings of Milton’s work.13 Lewis says that Fish’s “stylistic, rhetorical, and for- Miltonic criticism, however, was William bases his reading in part on hierarchy and mal analyses of Paradise Lost go a long way Blake. Not only did he illustrate several of the natural superiority of God, as well as the to dissuade us that Milton was “affected by Milton’s works, but he famously remarked in disobedience which causes the Fall, ideas anti-Christian feelings,” as Empson et al. had The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that Milton which surely would have been repugnant claimed. Both the seventeenth-century and “wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & 14 the twentieth-century “guilty reader” is drawn 5 to the Romantics to whom Lewis alludes. God and at liberty when of Devils & Hell.” Anticipating Fish, he contrasts the “unfallen into the poem to identify with Adam and Eve, Blake’s estimation is repeated throughout the sexual activity” of the early parts of the poem who are taken unawares by temptation and criticism surrounding Paradise Lost; indeed, with the fallen sexuality of the later sections Satan. Colie recognizes that Milton’s rhe- the character of Satan becomes the central fig- and argues that a “heroic” Satan is attractive torical strategies are meant to convey proper ure in what came to be known as “the Milton because an evil character is incomparably Christian doctrine.19 Barbara Lewalski, controversy,” and Satan presents Fish with easier to draw than a good one.15 It is easy to meanwhile, criticizes the reader-response the opportunity to make some of his strongest draw on the “bad passions” within ourselves; approach to the text: “Fish’s theologically arguments in Surprised by Sin. it is more difficult to imagine the best in grounded insistence upon the defects of the By the early twentieth century, the image ourselves “prolonged and more consistently ‘fallen’ readers deprives them of any basis for of Milton as a republican combatting tyranny embodied in action.”16 criticizing the poem: everything in the poem was replaced by a consideration of Milton the In Surprised by Sin, Fish responds to must be assumed to succeed entirely … for epic poet. The Latinate (and often obscure) Milton’s critics with an ingenious argument: whatever difficulties fallen readers encounter style of Paradise Lost was criticized by the must result from their own defects rather than that we find Satan and his rhetoric so attractive 20 modernists, including T. S. Eliot, William and God so forbidding because we, as readers, their author’s.” Lewalski’s general opinion Empson, Ezra Pound, and F. R. Leavis. To are fallen. Like Adam and Eve, we fall into of the book, however, is positive: she appreci- them, Milton’s God was a cruel tyrant who the trap of Satan’s magnificent speeches and ates Fish’s engagement with the epic similes simply gave long and boring speeches. In a (anti)heroic gestures precisely because we and style of the poem. John Peter Rumrich 1936 essay, Eliot opines that Paradise Lost have inherited the faults of our first parents. was one of Fish’s detractors, insisting that “is not serious poetry, not poetry fully occu- his work relies primarily on rhetoric, just as In the preface to the book, Fish summarizes 21 pied about its business, but rather a solemn his purpose: Satan does in the poem. But even Rum- game.”6 Noted (and formidable) critic F. R. rich, in a later article (within a footnote), My subject is Milton’s reader, and my Leavis does not mince words in his commen- admits to the legacy of Surprised by Sin and thesis, simply, that the uniqueness of taries on Milton and the pro-Milton camp.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • 93708615 Bloom S Shakespeare Through the Ages Othello Harold
    Bloom’s Shakespeare Through the Ages Antony and Cleopatra As You Like It Hamlet Henry IV (Part I) Julius Caesar King Lear Macbeth The Merchant of Venice A Midsummer Night’s Dream Othello Romeo and Juliet The Sonnets The Taming of the Shrew The Tempest Twelfth Night Bloom’s Shakespeare Through the Ages OTHELLO Edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University Volume Editor Neil Heims Bloom’s Shakespeare Through the Ages: Othello Copyright © 2008 by Infobase Publishing Introduction © 2008 by Harold Bloom All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information contact: Bloom’s Literary Criticism An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Othello / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom ; volume editor, Neil Heims. p. cm. — (Bloom’s Shakespeare through the ages) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7910-9575-1 (acid-free paper) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616. Othello. 2. Othello (Fictitious character) I. Bloom, Harold. II. Heims, Neil. III. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616. Othello. PR2829.O77 2008 822.3’3—dc22 2007026815 Bloom’s Literary Criticism books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755.
    [Show full text]
  • Introduction
    © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. introduction Nothing can exceed the energy and magnificence of the character of Satan in “Paradise Lost.” It is a mistake to suppose that he could ever have been intended for the popular personification of evil. —shelley, The Defence of Poetry 1. “Too full of the Devill” Paradise Lost is not an orthodox poem and it needs to be rescued from its orthodox critics. This book contends that the best way back to the poem Milton composed, rather than the one the orthodox would have us read, is to reassert the importance of Satan, heretic and hater. I shall be doing this in various ways. One is through revising the history of the Satan that Milton reimagines for us, since a mistaken idea about it has been widely accepted in recent years. It is the combat myth, I argue, that has always been at the center of that history, and Milton knew it. His more perceptive readers have kept it there, for the opposition is central to the poem. “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true poet and of the Devils party without knowing it.”1 Blake’s aphorism has become so famous that it is hard to hear what it says. I think that, like much Romantic criticism, it is right, or at least helpful, except for the implied accusation of ignorance.
    [Show full text]
  • William Empson: Genius of Ambiguity Charles I
    j_ WILLIAM EMPSON: GENIUS OF AMBIGUITY CHARLES I. GLtCKSDERG* W ILLIAM EMPSON employs a method that is highly technical and specialized, but it must be admitted that it yields some astonishingly fruitful rosults. At least, it pro­ vides in the field of literary criticism an effective cure for glib generalizations. Instead of offering us brilliant theorizing and un­ focused emotional reactions, the stock-in-trade of the impres­ sionist, this enterprising scholar-critic patiently undertakes the task of disentangling the ambiguities of meaning in the skein of poetic context. He uses the word "ambiguity" in a special sense as any "consequence of language, however slight, which adds some nuance to the direct statement of prose". He is thus in­ terested in catching overtones of expression, hidden nuances and implications not revealed by a superficial reading of the text, subtleties and indirections precipitated by means of protracted analysis and the developed technique of free association. In­ herent in poetry is the process of diffused association, and the richer, the more varied and original the diffuson, the greater the genius of the poet. And greater, too, by implication, it would seem, is the genius of the critic who can bring this diffused glory to light. Words may possess, as I. A. Richards has taught us on nu­ merous occasions, a number of distinct meanings- meanings I ·l that cluster together in a system of interanimation. The in­ .1, dwelling ambiguity springs from an indecision as to the meaning . ~ intended. Frequently the meaning branches off in different di­ r ections, and it is a nice question for the reader to determine I which road to take.
    [Show full text]
  • A MEDIUM for MODERNISM: BRITISH POETRY and AMERICAN AUDIENCES April 1997-August 1997
    A MEDIUM FOR MODERNISM: BRITISH POETRY AND AMERICAN AUDIENCES April 1997-August 1997 CASE 1 1. Photograph of Harriet Monroe. 1914. Archival Photographic Files Harriet Monroe (1860-1936) was born in Chicago and pursued a career as a journalist, art critic, and poet. In 1889 she wrote the verse for the opening of the Auditorium Theater, and in 1893 she was commissioned to compose the dedicatory ode for the World’s Columbian Exposition. Monroe’s difficulties finding publishers and readers for her work led her to establish Poetry: A Magazine of Verse to publish and encourage appreciation for the best new writing. 2. Joan Fitzgerald (b. 1930). Bronze head of Ezra Pound. Venice, 1963. On Loan from Richard G. Stern This portrait head was made from life by the American artist Joan Fitzgerald in the winter and spring of 1963. Pound was then living in Venice, where Fitzgerald had moved to take advantage of a foundry which cast her work. Fitzgerald made another, somewhat more abstract, head of Pound, which is in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Pound preferred this version, now in the collection of Richard G. Stern. Pound’s last years were lived in the political shadows cast by his indictment for treason because of the broadcasts he made from Italy during the war years. Pound was returned to the United States in 1945; he was declared unfit to stand trial on grounds of insanity and confined to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for thirteen years. Stern’s novel Stitch (1965) contains a fictional account of some of these events.
    [Show full text]
  • Ii the New Criticism and Leavisian Criticism
    II THE NEW CRITICISM AND LEAVISIAN CRITICISM Though the New Criticism had its ongms in Britain in the criticism of T. S. Eliot, the theory of I. A. Richards and the practice of William Empson, its most powerful impact has been in America. John Crowe Ransom, who published a book entitled The New Criticism in 1941, was the leading American influence and he acknowledged a debt to Eliot and Richards. The other major American New Critics were Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren and W. K. Wimsatt. Indirectly related to the New Criticism are such important figures as Kenneth Burke and R. P. Blackmur. The early New Critics were politically conservative and their attitudes to literature were shaped by their opposition to certain twentieth-century tendencies of thought, such as Marxism. The fundamental aim of American New Criticism was to create a critical alternative to impressionism and historical scholarship, and thus there are some parallels with Russian Formalism. It advocated 'intrinsic' criticism - an impersonal concern for the literary work as an independent object - and opposed 'extrinsic' critical approaches, which concerned themselves with such matters as authorial intention, historical, moral or political considerations, and audience response. The earlier New Criticism was primarily interested in lyric poetry and regarded most highly forms of poetry in which irony, tension, paradox and ambiguity interact with the semantics of language in such a way, they believed, as to render poetic meaning unique and un­ paraphrasable. They claimed, however, that poetry could impart knowledge but a form of knowledge radically different from knowledge in the scientific sense.
    [Show full text]
  • (London, 1988), P. 125. PROLOGUE
    NOTES PREFACE 1. William Empson, Arguejying (London, 1988), p. 125. PROLOGUE: FAMILY TIES 1. Dame Felicitas Corrigan, Siegfried Sassoon: Poet's Pilgrimage (London, 1973), p. 17. 2. See Keith Middlemass, Edward VII (London, 1975), p. 44. 3. See Stanley Jackson, The Sassoons: Portrait of a Dynasty (London, 1968), pp. 84-88. 4. Jackson (1968), p. 75. 5. In 1871 her sister Laura became the second wife of Lawrence Alma- Tadema (1836-1912), the Dutch-born painter who in the 1880s and 90s achieved popular successes with his imaginary scenes from classical Greece, Rome and ancient Egypt. 6. Jackson (1968), p. 76. 7. In The Old Century there is mention of a cook and two maids, with a nurse - later replaced by a German governess - to look after the boys. The male element consisted of the head-gardener, two under-gardeners and Richardson the groom. 8. Philip Hoare, Serious Pleasures: the Life of Stephen Tennant (London, 1990), p. 88. 9. His book collecting may have reminded him of his grandfather Sassoon David Sassoon, who had spent his leisure hours building up a library of rare Hebrew manuscripts. Cf. Jackson (1968), p. 38. 10. Cf. Sassoon's own account of this venture in The Old Century, pp. 279-82. 11. Corrigan (1973), pp. 55-6. 12. Rupert Brooke's last girlfriend, the actress Cathleen Nesbitt (1888-1982) records in her memoirs, A Little Love (London, 1977), that she met Brooke later that same day and that he was full of indignation about Sassoon's remark. That she should recall such a trivial incident over sixty years later (and at the time Sassoon was still a complete unknown) is hard to believe, especially since, according to Sassoon's version, Brooke did not really make an issue out of it.
    [Show full text]
  • Introduction
    Notes Quotations from Love’s Martyr and the Diverse Poetical Essays are from the first edition of 1601. (I have modernized these titles in the text.) Otherwise, Shakespeare is quoted from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 2nd edn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). Jonson, unless otherwise noted, is quoted from Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52), and Edmund Spenser from The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw, Charles Osgood and Fredrick Padelford, 10 vols (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932–57). Introduction 1. Colin Burrow, ‘Life and Work in Shakespeare’s Poems’, Shakespeare’s Poems, ed. Stephen Orgel and Sean Keilen (London: Taylor & Francis, 1999), 3. 2. J. C. Maxwell (ed.), The Cambridge Shakespeare: The Sonnets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), xxxiii. 3. See, for instance, Catherine Belsey’s essays ‘Love as Trompe-l’oeil: Taxonomies of Desire in Venus and Adonis’, in Shakespeare in Theory and Practice (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 34–53, and ‘The Rape of Lucrece’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Poetry, ed. Patrick Cheney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 90–107. 4. William Empson, Essays on Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 1. 5. I admire the efforts of recent editors to alert readers to the fact that all titles imposed on it are artificial, but there are several reasons why I reluctantly refer to it as ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’. Colin Burrow, in The Complete Sonnets and Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), chooses to name it after its first line, the rather inelegant ‘Let the bird of lowdest lay’, which, out of context, to my ear sounds more silly than solemn.
    [Show full text]
  • The Emergence of Formalist Criticism: an Overview
    THE EMERGENCE OF FORMALIST CRITICISM: AN OVERVIEW SANDEEP KUMAR SHARMA Research Scholar Department of English Punjabi University, Patiala (Punjab) INDIA In their critical theories, the stress was laid only on the ideas and intellectual contents of the work of art. Early Victorians had emphasized the moral, social and religious uses of literature which had resulted in extrinsic approach to literature. As a reaction to these movements a 'new' movement appeared on the literary scene which propagated for the study of the 'form' and 'artistic' aspects of a work of art, and was named 'Formalist' school or a school of 'new' critics. They felt that the only course open for the literary criticism to avoid being exploited by industrialism, and save literature from history, sociology and science. The concentration on the form, structure, technique, images, metaphors rhymes and such other items was thought to be worthwhile as it was thought that it could give the analysis of a literary work wider depth of meaning and help the critic explore the real depth of meaning. Key Words: Structure, Formalist Criticism, New Critics, Aesthetic Sensibility. The writers and critics of America and England were very much dissatisfied at the turn of the twentieth century. The intellectuals of that period suffered from literary unrest because their hopes and expectations which they had from the new century were going to remain unfulfilled. Though in the wake of scientific advances, the whole atmosphere was pregnant with intellectual activity, the literary theoreticians thought that there had come a stagnation in the field of literary criticism. This feeling of stagnation in criticism sustained because there were many critical schools prevalent which approached a literary work from external standpoints only.
    [Show full text]
  • Schiller's Naive and Sentimental Poetry and the Modern Idea Of
    SCHILLER’S NAIVE AND SENTIMENTAL POETRY AND THE MODERN IDEA OF PASTORAL Paul Alpers University of California, Berkeley Certain topics figure prominently in most scholarly and critical accounts of pastoral—nature, the Golden Age, idyllic landscape, innocence, and nostalgia. For most readers, these are simply the manifest features of pastoral. But any critical observation or interpretation involves cultural, institutional or personal commitments. The assumption that pastoral is defined by idealized nature and the features associated with it derives from a specific poetics, which so far as it concerns pastoral, has its profoundest statement in On Naive and Sentimental Poetry. Schiller provides an anatomy of modern thinking about pastoral and enables us to see connections and implications in a way no later criticism does. Schiller’s account of pastoral is embedded in a general theory of poetry, and particularly of the nature of modern poetry. Its intellectual imperatives and cultural urgencies come from the analogy between the growth of the individual and the progress of human history. “This path taken by the modern poets,” he says at one point, “is that along which man in general, the individual as well as the race, must pass.”1 Schiller represents man’s original condition—in the childhood of the individual and historically in ancient Greece—as one of unity within himself and with the world around him: “Sense and reason, passive and active faculties, are not separated in their activities, still less do they stand in conflict with one another” (193). But as man develops and civilization and art lay their hands upon him, “that sensuous harmony in him is withdrawn, and he can now express himself only as a moral unity, i.e., as striving after unity.
    [Show full text]
  • And Hetta, Lady Empson
    CORRESPONDENCE AND OTHER PAPERS OF SIR WILLIAM EMPSON (1906 – 1984) and HETTA, LADY EMPSON, (1915 – 1996) [DEN, DEN(2) & DEN(3)] Catalogued by: The University of Hull Brynmor Jones Library 2004 CONTENTS Page no. Introduction DEN 1 William Empson: dated letters and other manuscripts, 1 1915-1982 2 William Empson: undated letters 24 3 Hetta Empson: letters written mainly before she met William 28 Empson, 1938-1943 4 Hetta Empson: correspondence with Walter Brown, David 43 Jones and others, 1947-1982 5 Hetta Empson: letters written whilst in China, 1947-1952 55 6 Hetta Empson: letters to William Empson, 1948-1972 73 7 Miscellaneous documents, 1934-2000 97 8 Correspondence with Dr John Henry (David) Jones, 98 1976-1982 DEN(2) Fragmentary letters, 1948-1950 Letters from Hetta Empson to Walter Brown, 1952-1957 Letters from Hetta Empson to Walter Brown, 1968-1996 Letters from Walter Brown to Hetta Empson, 1950-1953 Miscellaneous, 1948-1979 DEN(3) INTRODUCTION William Empson - university teacher, poet, and literary analyst and critic - was born on 27 September 1906 at Yokefleet Hall, near Howden, East Yorkshire, and was the youngest son of Arthur Reginald Empson and his wife Laura, daughter of Richard Micklethwaite, of Ardsley House, Yorkshire. The Empson family had lived in East Yorkshire since at least the mid-17th century, building the Tudor-style Yokefleet Hall in about 1870. The Estate remained in the family until the late 1970s, with successive generations of close relatives visiting the Hall during vacations. Empson’s father died when William was ten. The boy’s formal education began at Pretoria (or Praetoria) House, West Folkestone, and in 1920 he won a scholarship to Winchester College.
    [Show full text]
  • William Empson, Isaiah Berlin, and the Cold War*
    M A R K T H O M P S O N VERSIONS OF PLURALISM: WILLIAM EMPSON, ISAIAH BERLIN, AND THE COLD WAR* Mark Thompson Seventy or eighty years ago the credo of value-pluralism1 was much rarer than 6it is today, and no literary figure in English modernism voiced it with more thoughtful zest than the poet and critic William Empson.2 Openness to plural meanings in words implies a liberal openness to plural values. This implication in Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) set off warning bells among some reviewers, though Empson’s pluralism was already clear in his student journalism of the ’20s, praising books that “gratify our strong and crucial curiosity about alien modes of feeling, our need for the flying buttress of sympathy with systems other than our own.”3 This early insight contained an ethical precept that he never abandoned, reminding readers in the ’60s of our “need to feel that, whatever we do with our own small lives, the rest of the world is still going on and exercising the variety of its forces.”4 Such was his conception of “world-mindedness.”5 Other systems (cultures, values, ways of doing things, “modes of feeling”) exist; their variety is valuable in itself; a sympathetic sense of their differentness is essential to our equilibrium; defending the former, we strengthen the latter. The notion of this sympathetic interest presupposes a humanist outlook, “recommending happi- ness on earth and so forth.”6 Here lay the humanistic common ground where altruism and self-interest could merge. While this notion was not derived from literature, it is borne out by literature and in literature more intensely than in other kinds of communication.
    [Show full text]
  • Style, Wit and Word-Play
    Style, Wit and Word-Play Style, Wit and Word-Play: Essays in Translation Studies in Memory of David Hawkes Edited by Tao Tao Liu, Laurence K. P. Wong and Chan Sin-wai Style, Wit and Word-Play: Essays in Translation Studies in Memory of David Hawkes, Edited by Tao Tao Liu, Laurence K. P. Wong and Chan Sin-wai This book first published 2012 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2012 by Tao Tao Liu, Laurence K. P. Wong and Chan Sin-wai and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-3571-4, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-3571-8 TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE .................................................................................................... vii Tao Tao Liu, Laurence K. P. Wong and Chan Sin-wai INTRODUCTION............................................................................................ ix “STYLE, WIT AND WORD-PLAY” – REMEMBERING DAVID HAWKES (1923-2009) Tao Tao Liu A TRIBUTE TO BROTHER STONE ................................................................... 1 John Minford WHAT IS THE POINT OF MAKING TRANSLATIONS INTO ENGLISH OF CHINESE LITERATURE: RE-EXAMINING ARTHUR WALEY AND DAVID HAWKES ......... 15 Tao Tao Liu SURPRISING THE MUSES: DAVI D HAWKES’ A LITTLE PRIMER OF TU FU ...... 33 Laurence K. P. Wong MIND THE GAP: THE HAWKES-MINFORD TRANSITION IN THE STORY OF THE STONE ..................................................................... 115 Chloë Starr THE TRANSLATOR AS SCHOLAR AND EDITOR: ON PREPARING A NEW CHINESE TEXT FOR THE BILINGUAL THE STORY OF THE STONE ................
    [Show full text]