ABSTRACT
Contemporary literary analysis exposes, once more, the ambiguity of language; and it does so not to impugn words and induce new schemes for a "real character," a more stable and truthful language-structure, but to heighten our awareness of the complex resource already in place. "Where the old Rhetoric," I. A. Richards writes in his Philosophy of Rhetoric, "treated ambiguity as a fault in the language, and hoped to confine or eliminate it, the new Rhetoric sees it as an inevitable consequence of the powers of language . . . " Ambiguity, at least in art, confirms these "pow ers," and suggests that modes of reading which assert the possibility of literal or unmediated expression are terrible simplifications.
