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Radical Empiricists
Five Modernist Close Readers
Helen Thaventhiran
Presents a new history of early twentieth-century criticism
Proposes innovative readings of the prose of five major poet-critics: I.A. Richards, T.S. Eliot, William Empson, R.P. Blackmur, and Marianne Moore
Includes a detailed theoretical and contextual introduction
Combines close readings with thorough textual analysis
Radical Empiricists presents a new history of criticism in the first half of the twentieth-century, against the backdrop of the modernist crisis of meaning. Our received idea of modernist criticism is that its novelty lay in being very empirical: critics believed in looking closely at words on the page. Such close reading has since been easy to ridicule, but this book seeks to consider whether this is fair: have we, in the rush either to dismiss, or even to defend, the idea of close reading, often failed to look closely at what it involves in practice? Against this oversight, Radical Empiricists turns close reading back on itself, proposing some innovative readings of the prose of five major modernist poet-critics: I.A. Richards, T.S. Eliot, William Empson, R.P. Blackmur, and Marianne Moore.
The book is divided into two parts, preceded by an introduction that explores what these five writers share: a radical self-consciousness about the key critical concept, "meaning." Part I, "How to read," considers the prose techniques of Eliot, Richards, and Empson as they push at the boundaries of verbal analysis in other disciplines: experimental psychology and anthropology, classical commentary, and textual criticism. Part II introduces Blackmur and Moore, alongside Empson, and takes a more polemical look at how their critical styles defy various modernist orthodoxies about "how not to read" (for example, that paraphrase always destroys poetic meaning). Many of these orthodoxies remain current: re-visiting their history, and attending to the rich detail of critical prose styles, can allow us to lift some old, unreflective constraints on our ways of knowing about poems.
INTRODUCTION: modernist criticism and the meaning of meaning
PART I: How to Read
I. Annotation: T.S. Eliot and marginal commentary
II. Experiment: I.A. Richards and critical bathos
III. Emendation: William Empson and the textual crux
PART II: How Not to Read
IV. Paraphrase: William Empson's cheerful heresies
V. Circumlocution: R.P. Blackmur's failures of style
VI. Parataxis: Marianne Moore's reticent sentences
CONCLUSION: feedback-feedforward
Helen Thaventhiran studied for her B.A. and Ph.D. in Cambridge (at Trinity Hall and King's respectively), and for an M.St. in twentieth-century literature at New College, Oxford. From 2009-2013, she held a Junior Research Fellowship at Christ's College, Cambridge. She is currently a fellow of Robinson College, where she is Director of Studies for English, and an affiliated lecturer of the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge. She has also taught English in Bosnia and China. Helen's research interests include prose, philosophy of language, criticism, intellectual history, and modernism.
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