(37) "Ambivalence" suggests hesitancy in choosing one over the other, whereas "
multivalence" suggests contentment in allowing both to stand simultaneously.
So far, none of those proposed by the essayists--crossover, contextual analysis, process and medium, redefinition, acquired knowledge, immersion, holism, or
multivalence --has achieved the desired accommodation, and none is truly new.
Yet, at every stage, the presumption is challenged, if not undermined, by linguistic, here both verbal and musical,
multivalence. It might be noted that Gioseffo Zarlino gave expression to the tendency to accommodate the music to the text by formulating it as a compositional directive.
Thus he looks to dissonances in the practice of fagging to reflect upon homosexuality as resistance to manly Englishness, which in turn allows him to establish the
multivalence of dominant discourse and to foreshadow James's textual practice.
There is every reason to believe that The Crucible of War has become a new version of the American master narrative, despite its deliberate
multivalence and its author's disarming admissions.
In the end, the very
multivalence of the Civil War as cultural symbol renders Young's notion of "women's writing and the Civil War" so diffuse, that its value as a counter-canon is hard to grasp.
His social, symbolic and artistic commitments were just as strong, while Le Corbusier, Wright, Mies, Aalto, or Kahn, Stirling, Eisenman and Gehry have made great contributions to twentieth-century architecture, their work has usually been built more quickly, without as much depth and
multivalence as Gaudi's.
proceeds to locate this kind of
multivalence in a long list of
Through the use of personae and different speaking voices, irony could create a distance and broaden the sphere of relations between the author and the speaker, endowing the poem with creative
multivalence. It would thus allow contemporary poetry to be engaged in contemporary issues without becoming journalistic, narrowly topical, or primitively direct.
Acceptance of the
multivalence of women themselves can provide empowerment and spark political action for women.
It may well be that in our postmodern sense of the word information - synonomous with equivocation or entropy in cases of electronic transmission (what most of us would call static) - poetic ambiguity and
multivalence offer the richest possible medium for "information." But the critical issues are Rezeption and, in the word that begins canto 4 part v, "Action!" Even though that episode turns out to be the poem's nadir, the moment of action not taken by thirty faculty confronting police on the steps of Sproul Hall, "which Governor Reagan / had declared off-limits / to any assembly." The faculty are "nudged to one side / in slow motion." As Scott writes, "we all know there / is no easier task / than to sweep away faculty//it was not in the next day's paper / not even the campus paper.")
Yet towering above the modernist valorization of
multivalence, tension, ambiguity, and paradox is the principle of coherence, the poet's role being to "fuse the irrelevant and discordant" into ordered, significant form (Brooks 77).
For David Bevington, for instance, the 'multi-valence' of The Shoemakers' Holiday is best seen as the careful negotiation by the playwright of a safe political middle ground, whereas for Frank Whigham, '
multivalence' is ideologically charged and by no means a via media.
The power, and conceptual
multivalence, of words comes closer still in Thomas Grey's '.
