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Ambiguity in the sense of two or more possible meanings is considered to be a distinctive feature of modern art and literature. It characterizes the "open artwork" (Eco) and is generated by "disruptive tactics" (Wellershoff) and strategies to engender uncertainty. While ambiguity is seen as a "paradigm of modernity" (Bode), there is skepticism regarding its use in the pre-modern era. Older studies were dominated by the conviction that there was a lack of ambiguity in pre-modernity because, according to the rules of the "old rhetoric", ambiguity was seen as an avoidable error (vitium) and a violation of the dictate of clarity (perspicuitas). The aim of the volume is to re-examine the putative "absence of ambiguity" in the pre-modern era. Is it not possible to find clear examples of deliberately employed (intended) ambiguity in antiquity? Are the oracles and riddles, the Palinode of Stesichoros and Socrates (Phaedrus), the dissoi logoi of rhetoric, the ambiguities of the tragedies all exceptions or do they not indicate a distinct interest in the artistic use of ambiguity? The presentations of the conference, which will include scholars from various philologies, will combine a recourse to theoretical concepts of intended ambiguity with exemplary analyses from the field of pre-modern art and literature.
In the Western imagination, Islamic cultures are dominated by dogmatic religious norms that permit no nuance. Those fighting such stereotypes have countered with a portrait of Islam’s medieval “Golden Age,” marked by rationality, tolerance, and even proto-secularism. How can we understand Islamic history, culture, and thought beyond this dichotomy? In this magisterial cultural and intellectual history, Thomas Bauer reconsiders classical and modern Islam by tracing differing attitudes toward ambiguity. Over a span of many centuries, he explores the tension between one strand that aspires to annihilate all uncertainties and establish absolute, uncontestable truths and another, competing tendency that looks for ways to live with ambiguity and accept complexity. Bauer ranges across cultural and linguistic ambiguities, considering premodern Islamic textual and cultural forms from law to Quranic exegesis to literary genres alongside attitudes toward religious minorities and foreigners. He emphasizes the relative absence of conflict between religious and secular discourses in classical Islamic culture, which stands in striking contrast to both present-day fundamentalism and much of European history. Bauer shows how Islam’s encounter with the modern West and its demand for certainty helped bring about both Islamicist and secular liberal ideologies that in their own ways rejected ambiguity—and therefore also their own cultural traditions. Awarded the prestigious Leibniz Prize, A Culture of Ambiguity not only reframes a vast range of Islamic history but also offers an interdisciplinary model for investigating the tolerance of ambiguity across cultures and eras.
Examines seven types of ambiguity, providing examples of it in the writings of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and T.S. Eliot.
Ever since it was first published in 1930, William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity has been perceived as a milestone in literary criticism—far from being an impediment to communication, ambiguity now seemed an index of poetic richness and expressive power. Little, however, has been written on the broader trajectory of Western thought about ambiguity before Empson; as a result, the nature of his innovation has been poorly understood. A History of Ambiguity remedies this omission. Starting with classical grammar and rhetoric, and moving on to moral theology, law, biblical exegesis, German philosophy, and literary criticism, Anthony Ossa-Richardson explores the many ways in which readers and theorists posited, denied, conceptualised, and argued over the existence of multiple meanings in texts between antiquity and the twentieth century. This process took on a variety of interconnected forms, from the Renaissance delight in the ‘elegance’ of ambiguities in Horace, through the extraordinary Catholic claim that Scripture could contain multiple literal—and not just allegorical—senses, to the theory of dramatic irony developed in the nineteenth century, a theory intertwined with discoveries of the double meanings in Greek tragedy. Such narratives are not merely of antiquarian interest: rather, they provide an insight into the foundations of modern criticism, revealing deep resonances between acts of interpretation in disparate eras and contexts. A History of Ambiguity lays bare the long tradition of efforts to liberate language, and even a poet’s intention, from the strictures of a single meaning.
The essays turn about a single theme, the loss of the capacity to deal constructively with ambiguity in the modern era. Levine offers a head-on critique of the modern compulsion to flee ambiguity. He centers his analysis on the question of what responses social scientists should adopt in the face of the inexorably ambiguous character of all natural languages. In the course of his argument, Levine presents a fresh reading of works by the classic figures of modern European and American social theory—Durkheim, Freud, Simmel and Weber, and Park, Parsons, and Merton.
Seven Types of Ambiguity is a psychological thriller and a literary adventure of breathtaking scope. Celebrated as a novelist in the tradition of Jonathan Franzen and Philip Roth, Elliot Perlman writes of impulse and paralysis, empty marriages, lovers, gambling, and the stock market; of adult children and their parents; of poetry and prostitution, psychiatry and the law. Comic, poetic, and full of satiric insight, Seven Types of Ambiguity is, above all, a deeply romantic novel that speaks with unforgettable force about the redemptive power of love. The story is told in seven parts, by six different narrators, whose lives are entangled in unexpected ways. Following years of unrequited love, an out-of-work schoolteacher decides to take matters into his own hands, triggering a chain of events that neither he nor his psychiatrist could have anticipated. Brimming with emotional, intellectual, and moral dilemmas, this novel-reminiscent of the richest fiction of the nineteenth century in its labyrinthine complexity-unfolds at a rapid-fire pace to reveal the full extent to which these people have been affected by one another and by the insecure and uncertain times in which they live. Our times, now.
Ambiguity in the Western Mind includes a collection of essays by internationally renowned scholars such as John D. Caputo, Camille Paglia, Jaroslav Pelikan and Roland Teske along with a preface by Joseph Margolis, all taking up the question of the significance of ambiguity in Western thought. This engaging topic will be of interest to scholars and students alike from across the disciplines. Tracing the conceptual relevance of ambiguity historically and through some of the great books that have formed Western consciousness, this volume is a major contribution to the contemporary discussion surrounding this controversial notion, especially as a hermeneutical concept for interpreting the classics.
American composer Morton Feldman is increasingly seen to have been one of the key figures in late-twentieth-century music, with his work exerting a powerful influence into the twenty-first century. At the same time, much about his music remains enigmatic, largely due to long-standing myths about supposedly intuitive or aleatoric working practices. In Composing Ambiguity, Alistair Noble reveals key aspects of Feldman's musical language as it developed during a crucial period in the early 1950s. Drawing models from primary sources, including Feldman's musical sketches, he shows that Feldman worked deliberately within a two-dimensional frame, allowing a focus upon the fundamental materials of sounding pitch in time. Beyond this, Feldman's work is revealed to be essentially concerned with the 12-tone chromatic field, and with the delineation of complexes of simple proportions in 'crystalline' forms. Through close reading of several important works from the early 1950s, Noble shows that there is a remarkable consistency of compositional method, despite the varied experimental notations used by Feldman at this time. Not only are there direct relations to be found between staff-notated works and grid scores, but much of the language developed by Feldman in this period was still in use even in his late works of the 1980s.