Helen Thaventhiran – författare

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 my book seeks to consider whether this is fair: have we, in the rush either to dismiss, or even todefend, 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 morepolemical 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, canallow us to lift some old, unreflective constraints on our ways of knowing about poems.

Philosophy's Margins draws together neglected texts from philosophy's archive to argue for close attention, within intellectual history, to how thought takes form. The book's particular focus is on an alternative intellectual history for philosophy's development in the first half of the twentieth century. It considers the lively philosophical imaginations and experimental forms of writing of five thinkers: Victoria Welby, Vernon Lee, May Sinclair, Alain Locke, and Susan Stebbing. The first three wrote from the margins of academic philosophy as it became an increasingly professionalised discipline, while the careers of the last two contour that shift. Their work suggests various ways in which philosophy's cultural, political, and personal vitality might be sustained against or alongside academic specialization. This book brings together archival research and a close reading approach to explore these writers' radical but under-studied contributions to philosophy's conceptual and cultural history, as well as to cultural modernism. In doing so, it aims to offer a new account of what philosophical writing has been and can be. Turning to notes in book margins, parables in private letters, verse translations, family diaries, a failed thesis, and other such unorthodox forms, it uncovers a lively transatlantic response to pragmatist philosophy, which became a litmus test for thinkers navigating questions of how to write about the world, words, and truth.

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 my 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.