The Rhetoric of Empiricism: Language and Perception from Locke to I.A. Richards

Front Cover
Cornell University Press, 1993 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 258 pages
Empiricism favors the visual over the verbal, the literal over the rhetorical, the static over the temporal: This is the standard charge leveled by literary theorists and writers. It is, Jules David Law demonstrates, remarkably misguided. His ambitious and challenging book explores the interplay of language and visual perception at the heart of empiricism. A re-evaluation of the British empiricist tradition from the perspective of contemporary literary theory, it also offers a sustained challenge to theory itself. In failing to grasp the issues confronting early empiricist writers or to be fully aware of their rhetorical strategies, Law says, theory has defined itself needlessly in opposition to empiricism. -- Description from http://www.booktopia.com.au (April 19, 2012).

From inside the book

Contents

and the Empiricist Construction of Rhetoric
19
Lockes Grammar of Reflection
51
Berkeleys
93
Burkes Analogy
131
Hazlitt
165
The Technique of Surface
204
The
235
WORKS CITED
249
Copyright

Common terms and phrases

Bibliographic information