New Criticism

Ferdinand de Saussure - structural linguist Course in General Linguistics (1915) general science of signs - semiology language as abstract, closed system under usage of language, can generate many utterances langue - underlying system parole - particular utterance need to study langue through signs

New Criticism – approach Empahsis on the autonomy or self-sufficiency of the work of art The poem possesses a truth of internal coherence, not of correspondence to external reality, and must be examined by an independent verbal structure. E.M. Forster: We have entered a universe that only answers to its own laws, supports itself, internally coheres, and has a new standard of truth. Information is true if it is accurate. A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself. Information is relative. A poem is absolute.

Main critical figures: T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards, William Empson Eliot: When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes. signs

Features: Act of explication, or close reading Detailed analysis of language and structure Intentional fallacy: criticism which seeks to explain a work of art in terms of its origins in the artist’s concious ‘self,’ often relying upon the writer’s explicit statements of intention. Affective fallacy: critical methods which try to measure the effect of the poem on the reader.

Eliot, from ‘East Coker’ And so each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling, Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer By strength and submission, has already been discovered Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope To emulate—but there is no competition— There is only the fight to recover what has been lost And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss. For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Tzvetan Todorov, Introduction to Poetics ...linguistics is concerned not with the interpretation or decoding of the individual utterance, but with the laws, conventions, operations that allow meaningful utterance to take place and to be understood... As langue stands to parole, system to process, so should poetics stand to interpretation, acts of literary criticism; it is this study of the systematics of literature that poetics, on the model of linguistics, takes to be its object of attention.

I love you not I love you notwithstanding

Defamiliarization, deviation, foregrounding Roland Barthes, S/Z example

Roland Barthes, S/Z To interpret a text is not to give it a (more or less justified, more or less free) meaning, but on the contrary to appreciate what plural constitutes it. Let us first posit the image of a trimphant plural, unimpoverished by any constraint of representation (of imitation). In this ideal text, the networks are many and interact, without any one of them being able to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoratatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as they eye can reach...

Barthes The interpretation demanded by a specific text, in its plurality, is in no way liberal: it is not a question of conceding some meanings, of magnanimously acknowledging that each one has its share of truth; it is a question, against all in-difference, of asserting the very existence of plurality, which is not that of the true, the probable, or even the possible.

signifier - perceivable material which seems to stand for something else (graphic marks, sonic disturbances) signified - mental state called up or associated with that material - meaning connection is arbitrary key concept in study -- difference signs are not determined by their concrete, positive qualities but by their position in the system as a whole value only in relation to other signifiers, only as what it is not - negative, difference study of relations

syntagmatic - rules governing signs in chain - a sentence - combination paradigmatic - relationship amongst all possibilities (absent) to each chain - substitution "The big pig ate Nate" para - small, white, not from but synt understandable

Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (1958)