Dramatic Theories of Voice in the Twentieth Century By Andrew Ki ...

the articulation of philosophical and scientific propositions—in essence, they adopted an optical regard of language that would be impossible without writing.

A backlash was not long in coming. Phenomenology, ordinary language philosophy, and speech act theory rebelled against positivism's reductionist approach to language and, in response, rehabilitated its sonorous dimensions, utilitarian uses, and relation to embodiment. From the human sciences of linguistics, anthropology, and sociology came the acknowledgment that language proves to be in constant flux and is never at one time a fixed and unalterable entity. Individual users have great autonomy in the innately human ability to play with language, to tweak it, poeticize it, sing it, and mangle it if they want to, all the while affording perfectly comprehensible speech acts, even if imperfectly grammatical. There is more to language than what meets the eye, so to speak, and various disciplines in the twentieth century went to the ear and the body to prove it. Although the chapters that follow discuss the position of the voice in these disciplines at length, I address here, for introductory reasons, two additional movements that also shared the disenchantment with the positivist program.

New Criticism as a school of literary criticism could be thought of as adopting an attitude toward language that opposed the positivism of analytic philosophy. Principally based at Cambridge University from the 1920s to the 1950s and developed by I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis, and William Empson, among others, New Criticism rejected critical trends at the beginning of the century that sought to place the meaning of literary works within authorial intention, cultural context, or an author's biography. Instead, it approached poems and novels as self-contained units and gleaned interpretations solely from within the works by paying close attention to word choice, structures, rhetorical tropes, and what Richards called the “interanimation” of words.¹⁴ A recurring strategy of New Criticism identified and validated the availability of multiple interpretations of any one text. New Criticism specifically prized ambiguity as a characteristic of the best writing, and this point was made forcefully in Empson's book of 1930, Seven Types of Ambiguity. The pride of