LECTURE 4

ALI 201: MODERN THEORIES OF LITERATURE

NEW CRITICISM
Objectives
By the end of this lecture, the student should be able to:
a) give a background to New Criticism
b) trace the origin of New Criticism
c) state the theoretical postulations of New Criticism
d) describe the influence of New Criticism in the growth of literary theory
e) give a reason for the decline of New Criticism
f) draw conclusions on New Criticism
g) summarise the concept of New Criticism
h) correctly attempt an assignment of New Criticism

a) Introduction
 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 rigour 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
humanising influence on readers and thus counter the alienating tendencies of modern,
industrial life.
 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 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.

b) The Emergence of New Criticism

 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.

c) Theoretical Postulations of New Criticism

1. 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 summarise 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.
2. Literary theories should be used 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.
 A good work should also have unity. The author, they argue, achieves this unity by
balancing and harmonising the conflicting ideas in the work. Everything in the work is
meaningfully linked together.
 Because the New Critics favoured 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.
3. The language of great works of literature should be accessible to modern readers:
 They were confident that well-trained interpreters could analyse, understand, and
evaluate works of literature.
 Since to them great literature was one of civilisation's proudest achievements, they
imbued literary criticism with a noble, even priestly quality.
  Their method of analysing 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.
4. 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.

d) The Influence of New Criticism on Literary Scholarship

 The success of New Criticism is 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.

e) The Decline of New Criticism

 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.
 The interest in ideological content could not be served by the New Critical insistence on
analysing the text as an isolated aesthetic object with a single meaning.

f) Conclusion
 For the New Critics, readers must focus attention on the literary work as the sole source of
evidence for 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 analyse 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, characterisation, plot, and so forth, which,
because they form, or shape, the literary work are called its formal elements.

g) Summary
1. For the New Critics, a literary work is a timeless, autonomous (self-sufficient) verbal object.
2. 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.
3. For the New Critics, the meaning of a poem could not be explained simply by paraphrasing
it, or translating it into everyday language.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.

h) 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?