THE NEW CRITICISM

BEGINNING Appeared as a reaction toward Biographical and Traditional Historical criticism, which was focused on extra-text materials, such as the biography of the author.

BEGINNING In the first half of the 20th C. the movement called The New Criticism grew on both sides of the Atlantic, in England and the United States. Hence, the full nomenclature is Anglo-American New Criticism.

The New Criticism is a type of formalist literary criticism that reached its height during the 1940s and 1950s. It received its name from John Crowe Ransom’s book The New Criticism (1941).

PIONEERS OF NEW CRITICISM T.S.Eliot–The Sacred Wood (1920) and After Strange Gods (1934) I.A. Richards– Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) John Crowe Ransom– The New Criticism(1941)

T.S.Eliot That criticism is bad which is just an expression of one’s personal predilections, and emotions. Good criticism is the result of refined sensibility. To be a good critic, one has to be abeing of a higher order. For such a person, technical and aesthetic analyses are necessary, but not sufficient conditions for sound criticism.

JOHN CROWE RANSOM Teaching literature meant concentrating on ‘criticism’. This meant defining and enjoying the aesthetic characteristics of literature. Treat literature as an art with its own laws of governance. ‘The Fugitive’, poetry magazine(1922-25) carries this method.

THE AMERICAN NEW CRITICISM a reactionary movement in its contempt for historical criticism Its anthologies– Understanding Poetry (1938),and Understanding Fiction (1943) “ If poetry (literature) is worth teaching at all, it is worth teaching as poetry (literature).”

MAJOR AMERICAN NEW CRITICS John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, R.P. Blackmur, Kenneth Burke, Yvor Winters, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, and William Wimsatt

BRITISH NEW CRITICS I.A. Richards, William Empson, the Scrutiny critics – F.R. Leavis, L. C. Knights, Derek Traversi

MAIN IDEAS The literary work is a timeless, autonomous, verbal object. Its meaning is as objective as its physical presence. Its complex meaning cannot be explained just by paraphrasing it, or by translating it into some other language.

Ideas Contd. The nature of literary language is different from the scientific, or everyday language. The form of literary language is inseparable from its content, and its meaning--- What a text means, and how it means it are one and the same. The work has an ideal, organic unity in which all elements contribute to create an indivisible whole.

Ideas Contd. The complexity of a work is often the result of multiple and conflicting meanings which are produced by such devices as irony, paradox, ambiguity, tension, etc. There are also figurative elements which unify a work such as images, metaphor, symbols, myths, similes.

The context and the language of the text are important for interpretation; hence, this critical practice is also called ‘ intrinsic’ criticism. The text is an autotelic artefact. It is complete and wholesome in itself, and it exists for its own sake. New Criticism is more pragmatic in its concerns, and it ought not to be construed merely as a doctrine.

NEW CRITICISM IN AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES By the early 1940s the movement established itself in the American universities, and younger scholars were in favour of this school in the post-war years. Close textual analysis came to replace arid historical scholarship, and theories about the language of poetry helped in strengthening the claims of the New Critics.

The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, and The Sewanee Review, and later even the conservative journals accepted, and adopted their mode of critical writings.

MERITS OF NEW CRITICISM The concentration of the New Critics on the linguistic aspects of a poem has immensely benefited the study of poetry. They have contributed enormously to the widening of the audience for reading poetry. The New Critics feel that poetry is not cut off from the world, but is always directed to it and bound by it.

MERITS New Critics are opposed to science. They have stressed the cognitive value of poetry; the knowledge it gives is greater than the knowledge one gets from science. The knowledge required for understanding the world can be acquired only by a union of feeling and intellect. Such a union is nowhere better achieved than in poetry.

MERITS The close reading that they encouraged, and developed later got institutionalized as a pedagogical weapon. The New Critics feel that unless a work of art is set off from all its antecedents, it cannot be fully approached as a coherent body of knowledge. The critic’s job is to see the work ‘as a totality, a configuration, a gestalt, a whole’.

CHARGES AGAINST THE NEW CRITICISM Rene Wellek says– Its ‘esoteric aestheticism’ shows no concern with the social function of literature, and it is like the revival of ‘art for art’s sake movement’. It aims to make criticism ‘scientific’. It is useful only at the level of trying to learn to read literary texts, and poetry in particular.

CHARGES The Chicago critics referred to the New Critics as ‘ the radical reformers of literary study,’ inspired by the res et verba ‘Hellenistic-Roman- Romantic-Rhetorical’ tradition. They termed the movement as ‘reactionary and obscurantist’.

CHARGES The myth critics also attacked the New Critics. Myth as a system of symbols, or metaphors is a central device in New Criticism. But the myth critics identified myth with literature: myth is the handmaiden of literature. They began to discuss myth as part of the content apart from the poem itself. They had no concern with judgement, or evaluation.

CHARGES The Geneva School, the structuralists, and the Russian formalists also attacked New Criticism. Its methodology is accused of being sterile, and often boring, routine and stereotyped. Many do not share the religious or political views of the New Critics.

NEW CRITICISM TODAY New theories are emerging today, extending the narrow limits of New Criticism through revision, and expansion of its formal concepts, such as connecting the author formally with his works, rather than historically or biographically… The works of structuralists, and phenomenologists are a positive contribution in this direction.

The New Critics under-emphasized the reader and the poet by over-emphasizing the object (the poem)… The under-emphasis of the poet has led to the counter movement hermeneutics (the science of interpretation, especially of the scriptures), and the banishment of the reader has led to the reader-response theories and reception aesthetics.

LEGACY OF THE MOVEMENT The habit of reading it promoted during the ‘40s through ‘60s is prevalent even now. The ‘close reading’ of texts that it taught us is now practised as a regular pedagogical method in teaching and learning. New Criticism dominated critical discourse for well over four decades.

LEGACY Only after the arrival of the New Critics, such other related disciplines as women’s studies, Black studies, and comparative literature began to establish themselves.

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