Module 10

NEW CRITICISM

New Criticism was a product of the American university in the 1930s and 40s. It stressed a close reading of the
text itself. As a strategy of reading, New Criticism viewed the work of literature as an aesthetic object
independent of historical context and as a unified whole that reflected the unified sensibility of the artist. New
Criticism aimed at bringing a greater intellectual rigor to literary studies, confining itself to careful scrutiny of the
text alone and the formal structures of paradox, ambiguity, irony, and metaphor, among others. The New
Critics were fired by the conviction that their readings of poetry would yield a humanizing influence on readers
and thus counter the alienating tendencies of modern, industrial life. In Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly
Guide, Lois Tyson (2006) submits that New Criticism dominated literary studies from the 1940s through the
1960s, and has left a lasting imprint on the way we read and write about literature. Some of its most important
concepts concerning the nature and importance of textual evidence—the use of concrete, specific examples
from the text itself to validate our interpretations— have been incorporated into the way most literary critics
today, regardless of their theoretical persuasion, support their readings of literature. For the New Critics, you
need thorough textual support for your literary interpretations.

To fully appreciate New Criticism’s contribution to literary studies today, we need to remember the form of
criticism it replaced: the biographical-historical criticism that dominated literary studies in the 19th century and
the early decades of the 20th. At that time, it was common practice to interpret a literary text by studying the
author’s life and times to determine authorial intention, that is, the meaning the author intended the text to
have. The author’s letters, diaries, and essays were combed for evidence of authorial intention as were
autobiographies, biographies, and history books. In its most extreme form, biographical-historical criticism
seemed, to some, to examine the text’s biographical-historical context instead of examining the text. In
America, the New Critics called their literary interpretation ―close reading. This unit, you are going to learn
some of New Criticism‘s contribution to literary studies and the theoretical framework that underlies their
interpretation. Some other theories like reader-response criticism and structuralism stand in opposition to New
Criticism.

OBJECTIVES

 At the end of this unit, you should be able to:

• trace the development of New Criticism

MAIN CONTENT

The Emergence of New Criticism

Kelly Griffith (2002) has noted that New Criticism is a product of the rise of Modernism and one of 20th
century's first theories about interpreting literature. Although New Criticism began well before World War II,
with the criticism of T. S. Eliot and I. A. Richards, it received its fullest expression after the war by such critics
as John Crowe Ransom, W. K. Wimsatt, Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Penn Warren.

The term New Criticism comes from the title of a book published by John Crowe Ransom in 1941, The New
Criticism. Ransom surveyed the work of new critics, making clear some of his own critical principles. Other
critics who agreed with Ransom came to be called the New Critics. The New Critics broke dramatically with the
19th-century emphasis on historical and biographical background. They held that understanding and
appreciating a work of literature need have little or no connection with the author's intended meanings, with the
author's life, or with the social and historical circumstances that may have influenced the author. Everything the
reader needs to understand and appreciate a work is contained within the work itself.
 SELF-ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 1

How is John Crowe Ransom significant to New criticism theory?

Main Interpretative Strategies of New Criticism

The New Critics see their method as "scientific." The work is a self-contained phenomenon made up of
"physical" qualities—language and literary conventions (rhyme, meter, alliteration, plot, point of view, and so
forth). These qualities can be studied in the same way a geologist studies a rock formation or a physicist the
fragmentation of light particles. But some New Critics, like Cleanth Brooks, claimed that the meaning contained
in works of literature cannot be paraphrased, cannot be separated from the work's form. One can state what a
work is "about" or summarize a work's themes, but a work's meaning is far more complex than such
statements alone. Brooks argued that a work's complexity lies in its "irony" or paradoxes. A paradox is a
statement that seems contradictory but is nonetheless true. Statements such as "the first shall be last" or "you
must lose your life to gain it" are paradoxes. Brooks claimed that good works of literature are filled with
paradoxes.

The New Critics used their theories about literature to judge the quality of works of literature. A "good" work,
they believed, should contain a network of paradoxes so complex that no mere summary of the work can do
them justice; yet, a good work should also have unity. The author, they argue, achieves this unity by balancing
and harmonizing the conflicting ideas in the work. Everything in the work is meaningfully linked together.
Because the New Critics favored complex, yet unified, works, they downgraded works that seemed simple or
those that lacked unity. They preferred "difficult" works that contained apparently illogical and troubling
material. They preferred works that stayed away from social and historical subject matter and that dealt rather
with private, personal, and emotional experience.

SELF-ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 2

What literary texts attract exponents of New Criticism most?

The New Critics believed that the language of great works of literature should be accessible to modern
readers. They were confident that well-trained interpreters could analyze, understand, and evaluate works of
literature. Since to them great literature was one of civilization’s proudest achievements, they imbued literary
criticism with a noble, even priestly quality. Their method of analyzing literature—using literary elements to
reveal artistry and meaning—was easy to understand and even "democratic" as anyone could appreciate and
interpret great literature once they learned how. Finally, their method excused interpreters from having to
master biographical and historical background. They believed that all that was needed was a careful and
thorough scrutiny of the works themselves.

SELF-ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 3

Why do New Critics ―adore‖ complex works?

As a student of literary theory, you should study "The Intentional Fallacy" and "The Affective Fallacy," two
influential New Critical essays by W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley. They are contained in Wimsatt's The
Verbal Icon (1954). Another stimulating work of New Criticism is Cleanth Brooks's The Well Wrought Urn
(1947).

CONCLUSION

For the New Critics, readers must focus attention on the literary work as the sole source of evidence for
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interpreting it. The life and times of the author and the spirit of the age in which he or she lived are certainly of
interest to the literary historian, New Critics argued, but they do not provide the literary critic with information
that can be used to analyze the text itself. According to the New Critics, knowing an author’s intention,
therefore, tells us nothing about the text itself, hence they coined the term intentional fallacy to refer to the
mistaken belief that the author’s intention is the same as the text’s meaning. Although the author’s intention or
the reader’s response is sometimes mentioned in New Critics’ readings of literary texts, neither one is the
focus of analysis. Rather, the only way we can know if a given author’s intention or a given reader’s
interpretation actually represents the text’s meaning is to carefully examine, or ―closely read, all the evidence
provided by the language of the text itself: its images, symbols, metaphors, rhyme, meter, point of view,
setting, characterization, plot, and so forth, which, because they form, or shape, the literary work are called its
formal elements.

As is evident today, the success of New Criticism in that it has focused our attention on the formal elements of
the text and on their relationship to the meaning of the text. This is evident in the way we study literature today,
regardless of our theoretical perspective. For whatever theoretical framework we use to interpret a text, we
always support our interpretation with concrete evidence from the text that usually includes attention to formal
elements, to produce an interpretation that conveys some sense of the text as a unified whole.

Ironically, however, New Criticism’s gift to critical theory—its focus on the text itself—was responsible for its
downfall. New Criticism was eclipsed in the late 1960s by the growing interest, among almost all other schools
of critical theory, in the ideological content of literary texts and the ways in which that content both reflects and
influences society, an interest that could not be served by the New Critical insistence on analyzing the text as
an isolated aesthetic object with a single meaning.

SUMMARY

As you have read in this unit, for the New Critics, a literary work is a timeless, autonomous (self-sufficient)
verbal object. Readers and readings may change, but the literary text stays the same. Its meaning is as
objective as its physical existence on the page, for it is constructed of words placed in a specific relationship to
one another—specific words placed in a specific order—and this one-of-a-kind relationship creates a complex
of meaning that cannot be reproduced by any other combination of words. For the New Critics, the meaning of
a poem could not be explained simply by paraphrasing it, or translating it into everyday language. You should
remember that since New Critics believed their interpretations were based solely on the context created by the
text and the language provided by the text, they called their critical practice intrinsic criticism, to denote that
New Criticism stayed within the confines of the text itself.

SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 4

Why did New Critics refer to their critical practice as ―intrinsic criticism‖?

In contrast, other forms of criticism that employ psychological, sociological, or philosophical frameworks—in
other words, all criticism other than their own—they called extrinsic criticism because they go outside the
literary text for the tools needed to interpret them. New Critics also called their approach objective criticism
because their focus on each text‘s own formal elements ensured, they claimed, that each text—each object
being interpreted— would itself dictate how it would be interpreted.

ASSIGNMENT
i. Discuss the concept of ―close reading‖ as used by the New Critics.
ii. In what ways are the New Critics similar to the Formalists?

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