LITERARY CRITICISM AND ESPIONAGE.

LITERARY CRITICISM AND ESPIONAGE. William Empson’s book SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY made a big impression on me when I was young. I posted here about Empson’s analysis of “Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang….” While reading some essays by Ron Rosenbaum, I came across the fact that the legendary James Jesus Angleton was influenced by Empson. Angleton was head of counterintelligence in the CIA from 1954 to 1974. This post on the Spartacus Educational website and this wikipedia article give the flavor of Angleton’s thinking as he dealt with the problems of sorting out double agents and triple agents. This article by Jeet Heer tells more about the impact of literary critics on the CIA. Heer says: “Mole-hunter James Jesus Angleton, the most controversial figure in CIA history, began his career as an apprentice of the New Critics on Yale’s English faculty, and his literary training in “close reading” may have shaped his hyper-skeptical (some would say paranoid) approach to counterintelligence.” Heer says: “Angleton once defined counterintelligence as ‘the practical criticism of ambiguity.’ (As William Epstein observes, this phrase is ‘derived from the titles of two of the most influential texts of formalist criticism, Richards’s `Practical Criticism’ and Empson’s `Seven Types of Ambiguity.'”)