Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Blog post 4- Humphrey Minott

In this work by Richards he explains that words do not necessarily communicate a meaning, or a message; they cannot stand alone or else they mean nothing at all because there is no context. He also mentions symbols, thoughts, and relations in his philosophy of rhetoric.
In the first excerpt about words, and intonation in writing I believe Richards is arguing that everything depends on the literary context in which it was stated because it could mean all sorts of things that cause verbal misunderstanding. In the second excerpt about symbols, I believe Richards is arguing that symbols in language record events and communicate facts. Between the communicated facts and the recorded events, there is an indirect or direct relation.
Some parts in this reading were very puzzling. When Richards was talking about science and recent revolutions in physics I was very confused because I did not see why it was relevant, and I really did not understand what he meant by it in general. Is he trying to say how the idea of symbolism has been question and rejected and compare that to other theories and their rejections in science? I have no idea.

Richards stated “…the people Wordsworth was thinking of when he wrote his preface, confused the poetic product with the poetic process and thought a poem good because it used poetic diction… and used them in the same ways”. Richards basically explained how poets are an assemblage. He goes on to say that we take fixed factors built up in meaning through sentences of mosaic and put it together in discrete independent tesserae; Richards basically summarizes an assemblage, or remix.

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