Ambiguities and Performatives: and Performances, Too. Graham Hough; Chris Kraus/ Jenny Turner

Abstract

 The most striking sentence in the late Graham Hough’s essay ‘An Eighth Type of Ambiguity’ is: “…behind Empson’s seven types of ambiguity there lurks an eighth – ambiguity between intended and achieved meaning” (p. 223). Hough illustrates the difference between intended and achieved meaning elegantly, in a series of pieces of literary analysis with which none of the old ‘New Critics’ could disagree, and which any post-Derrida, post-Theory (theory of what?) critic need not cavil at. For all the commonsensicality of Hough’s literary analysis, it is not quite clear that Empson’s seven types and Hough’s eighth type one of the same logical type. This is a question to which I shall have to return. It is the issue crucial to what seems to be Hough’s claim to add 1 to Empson’s 7: If, indeed, that is his claim.