Empson’s “Argufying”:
Exploring the Origin of The New Criticism from the Perspective of “Argufying”
2025 Volume 45 Issue 1 Pages 5-19
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2025 Volume 45 Issue 1 Pages 5-19
“The New Criticism” is an intrinsic criticism from the 1930s to the 1950s that also greatly impacted Japanese English literary academies because of its analytical approach to understanding literary works through close reading. Several scholars assert that T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards and William Empson pioneered “The New Criticism”. Because Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity is said to be the model for “The New Criticism”, due to its similar style of literary criticism. However, Empson, who published his final book Using Biography in 1984, claimed that his style of criticism differed from the New Critics. Therefore, this paper focuses on whether or not Empson was one of the trailblazers of “The New Criticism” from the perspective of “argufying”, which can be defined as superficially heterogeneous but essentially homogeneous.
