Donne in the new edition

Empson, William; Haffenden, John

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511627477.005

Cited by 2 publications

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“…Many celebrities may lack (among their few lost privileges) the right to be ambivalent with their audience, in the way a friend might accept another friend's small paradoxes. Emma Watson's square, like so many others that proclaimed silently or out loud with the idea “I understand that I do not understand,” appealed to a specific one of Empson's types: “when two or more meanings of a statement do not agree among themselves, but combine to make clear a more complicated state of mind in the author” (Empson 1930:133). An ambivalent message can be felicitous (following Austin 1962: it can achieve its intent) if the overlapping scripts are received as a single cocktail: I am confused .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…(Or is it the other way?) The early champion of ambiguity emerged in literary theory; in Seven Types of Ambiguity , Empson (1930) admits that the types blur a bit. Following Empson, Sutton‐Smith (1997)—whose field is best described as the study of play, a categorically ambiguous social practice—explains that ambiguity is unapproachable from a single discipline (ibid:vii).…”

Section: Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Ambivalent Action: Recognizing Bothness in the Narratives of Blackout Tuesday¹

Levinson

2023

Sociological Forum

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Theories of behaviour, choice, and action have long presented an “act” as a kind of bottleneck of meaning‐making, where the action is either a cocktail of partial preferences or the survival of one over the rest. I argue that action is often something very (if subtly) different and propose “ambivalent action” as a category of moral action defined by the actor's conflicting intentions, in which the conflict is reified (not resolved) by the act. Situated in past and contemporary context, the term is an interdisciplinary bridge, with links from classical (if vague) theoretic treatments of “ambivalence” to new sociological analogies in the realm of quantum physics. I explore this duality through the case study of #BlackoutTuesday, a social media movement connected with global protests against police brutality and racism. The black square that characterized the movement is best understood as ambivalent action, as an act of two‐fold narrative‐making: “both” silence and speech. The “success” of an ambivalent action in remaining in two narratives at once is determined by the audience.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ambivalent Action: Recognizing Bothness in the Narratives of Blackout Tuesday¹

Levinson

2023

Sociological Forum

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“…[64] This might summon to mind a remark Empson made in Seven Types of Ambiguity that has become well known: 'The object of life, after all, is not to understand things, but to maintain one's defences and equilibrium and live as well as one can; it is not only maiden aunts who are placed like this.' [65] Your point about 'holding one's nerve' is unlike Empson's in its sense but then seems to have an Empsonian swerve in its rallying last phrase. Could you say a bit more about what you mean by 'holding one's nerve' -inliterature and life?…”

Section: Ht Bv: Widening Things Out I Wonder How Far You See Your Lon...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Voices and Publics: An Interview with Stefan Collini

Thaventhiran,

Vincent

2023

The Cambridge Quarterly

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SC: Well, I didn't come from a bookish home, to put it mildly, so for me, as for many people of my generation or my background, the public library was the great resource. In my childhood and early teen years, I read the sorts of things that boys of my age then read -adventure stories, historical novels, Biggles, Beau Geste, Rafael Sabatini, and other such great names of the past. I suppose the only oddity that at all relates to what we're talking about today is that, when I got into my mid and late teens, I developed an inexplicable interest in essays. When other red-blooded male teenagers were reading Dostoevsky or John Steinbeck and absorbed in the great existential questions of life and death, I was browsing among Edwardian and early twentieth century essayists for some reason. I can't really explain this, other than that I became fascinated by how the essayists' prose kept the fragile little creation of the essay afloat when there was no obvious narrative line or no obvious argumentative point. They were in some way discursive, personal, even whimsical, yet to me rather appealing. But why I got interested in those at that point, I don't know. Of course, I can see it now looks like some fingering of my fate in the future, but it may partly just have been accidents of the arrangements of the local library stacks as much as anything else. Anyway, although I am interested in the quirks of my own biography, as any reflective person has to be, I do not plan to write a memoir or an autobiography.HT, BV: So we'll have to glean a little more here. When you weren't in the public library, did you listen much to the radio? You've been an occasional broadcaster across the years, and always an acute analyst of the workings of cultural institutions such as the BBC. Were particular stations or programmes important to you? SC: When I was a child, my parents had the radio on a lot, because in the early years we didn't have a TV, so what was on in the background a great deal when I was growing up were things from the Light Programme and the Home Service, as they were then called. I can remember some of the bits of programmes that used to be on -they were my parents' choices, they had control of the dials -but I think the first ones that really made an impression on me and stayed with me were certain kinds of comedy programmes from that era, which may or may not be names to people now: 'Round the Horne', and I suppose what became the most famous, 'the Goon Show', and those I did think were in some way addressed to me more than to my parents when I was listening to them. The only music I heard when I was growing up -it wasn't a musical any more than a bookish household -was light music, of the kind that the Light Programme particularly broadcast, but in my mid-teens, I started to listen a bit to classical music and got interested in that. Then I was at the age where, like so many teenagers, I retreated to my bedroom a lot, and I had -in those days a great treasuremy own little transistor radio, and so then I listened to more clas...

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Donne in the new edition

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Ambivalent Action: Recognizing Bothness in the Narratives of Blackout Tuesday¹

Ambivalent Action: Recognizing Bothness in the Narratives of Blackout Tuesday¹

Voices and Publics: An Interview with Stefan Collini

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Donne in the new edition

Cited by 2 publications

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Ambivalent Action: Recognizing Bothness in the Narratives of Blackout Tuesday1

Ambivalent Action: Recognizing Bothness in the Narratives of Blackout Tuesday1

Voices and Publics: An Interview with Stefan Collini

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Ambivalent Action: Recognizing Bothness in the Narratives of Blackout Tuesday¹

Ambivalent Action: Recognizing Bothness in the Narratives of Blackout Tuesday¹