Chapter 3 Criticism
Chapter 3 Criticism
CRITICISM
The essential structureof a poemn (as distinguished from the rational or logical
struchure of the "statement"which we abstract from it) resembles that of architec
INTRODUCTION
tion with the emergence of a group of Russian scholars who articulateda setof
interpretiveprinciples known as Russian Formalism.
RUSSIAN FORMALISM
In the middle of the second decade of the twentieth century, two distinct
groups of Russian scholars emerged in Moscow and Petrograd (St.
Petersburg) who would radically change the direction of literarytheory and
criticism. Founded in 1915, the Moscow Linguistic Circle included in its
48
Chapter 3• Russian Formalism and New Criticism 49
Using linguisticprinciples, the Formalists asserted that literature, like all sci
ences,is a self-enclosed, law-governed system. To study literatureis to study
a text's form and only incidentally its content. For the Formalists, form is su
perior to content.
As a group, the Russian Formalists were suppressed and disbanded in
1930by the Soviet governmentbecause they were unwilling to view litera
ture through the Stalinist regime's political and ideological perspectives.
Their influence did continue to flourish in Czechoslovakia through the work
of the Prague Linguistic Circle (founded in 1926, its leading figure being
Roman Jakobson) and through the work of the Russian folktale scholar
Vladimir Propp. Fortunately forthe advancementof literary theory and crit
icism, Russian Formalism resurfaces in the 1960s in French and Ameriçan
structuralism (seeChapter 5).
Chapter 3 Russian Formalism and New Criticism 51
poetics
form
devices
literariness ODTÜKÜTÜPHANESI
foregrounding of literary language
defamiliarization.
METU LIBRARY
Mary M. Brown
NEW CRITICISM
ferred to in the penultimate line of the poem? How is Brown defining the
word Love in the poem's last line? What relationships between words or
concepts is Brown establishing in the text? What of the poem's physical
structure? Does the arrangement of the words, phrases, or sentences help
establish relationships among them?What is the poem's tone? How do you
know this isthe tone, and what devices does Brown employ to establish this
tone? What tensionsdoes Brown create in the poem? What ambiguities?
Does Brown successfully resolve these tensions by thepoem's end? Based on
the answers to all of these questions, what does the poem mean? In other
words, what is the poem's form or its overall meaning?
Upon close examination of these discussion questions, a distinct pattern
or methodology quickly becomes evident. This particular interpretivemodel
begins with a close analysis of thepoem's individual words, including both
denotative and connotative meanings, then moves to a discussion of possi
ble allusions within the text. Following this discussion, the teacher/critic
searches for any patterns developed through individual words, phrases,
clauses, sentences, figures of speech, and allusions. The critic's sharp eye
also notes any symbols (eitherpublic or private) that represent something
else. Other elements for analysis include point of view, tone, and any other
poeticdevice that will help the reader understand the dramatic situation.
After ascertaining how all the aforementioned information interrelates and
finally coalesces in the poem, the critic can then declare what the poem
means. The poem's overall meaning or form depends almost solely on,the
text in front of the reader. No library research, no studying of the author's
Chapter3 • Russian Formalism and New Criticism 53
students, formed the Fugitives, a group of scholars and critics who believed
in and practiced similar interpretative approaches to a text. Other sympa
ary analysis.
54 Chapter 3 •Russian Formalism and New Criticism
mate unity stems from their opposition to the prevailing methods of literary
HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT
At the beginning of the twentieth century (often said to mark the start of
modernism or the modernist period), historical and biographical research
dominated literary scholarship. Criticism's function, many believed, was to
discover the historical context of a text and to ascertain how the authors'
lives influenced their writings. Such extrinsic analysis (examining elements
outside the text to uncover the text's meaning) became the norm in the liter
ature departments of many American universities and colleges. Other forms
of criticism and interpretation were often intermingled with this prominent
emphasis on history and biography. For example, some critics believed we
should appreciate the text for its beauty. For these impressionistic critics,
how we feel and what we personally see in a work of art are what really mat
not infuse the poem with his or her personality and emotions, but uses larn
guage in such a way as to incorporate within the poem the impersonal feel
ings and emotions common to all humankind. According to Eliot, poetry is
not a freeing of the poet's emotions, but an escape from them. Because the
poem is an impersonal formulation of common feelings and emotions, the
successful poem unites the poet's impressions and ideaswith those common
to all humanity, producing a text that is not simply a reflectionof the poet's
personal feelings.
The New
1
hand, simply expresses his or her personal emotions and reactions to a text.
Such a reader is untrained in literary technique and craftsmanship.
Following Eliot's lead, the New Criticsdeclare thatthere areboth good and
bad readers or critics and good and bad criticism. A p0or reader and poor
criticism may argue that a poem can mean anything its reader or its author
wishes it to mean. On the other hand, a good reader or critic and good criti
cism will assert that only through a detailed structural analysis of a poem
can a reader discover the correct interpretation of a text.
Eliot also lends New Criticism some of its technical vocabulary. Thanks
to Eliot, for example, the term objective correlative has become a staple in
poetic jargon. According to Eliot, a writer can best express emotion through
art by devising what Eliot calls an objeçtive correlative,or a set of objects,a
situation, a chain of events, or reactions that can effectively awaken in the
reader the emotional response the author desires without being a direct
statement of that emotion. When the external elements are thus effectively
presented in a poem, they coalesce, immediately evoking an emotion. The
New Critics readily adopted and advanced this indirect or impersonal the
ory of the creation of emotions in poetry.
From Eliot's Britishcontemporary I. A. Richards, a psychologist, rhetori
cian, poet, and literary critic, New Criticism borrows a term that has become
synonymous with its methods of analysis, practical criticism. In an experi
ment atCambridge University, Richards distributed to his students copies of
poems minus such information as the authors, dates, and oddities of spelling
and punctuation, and asked them to record their responses. From these data,
Richards identified the difficulties that poetry presents to its readers, includ
ing matters of interpretation,poetic techniques, and specificmeanings. From
this analysis, Richards then devised an intricate system for arriving at a
poem's meaning, including a minute scrutiny of the text. It is this close
sCrutiny or close reading of a text that has become synonymous with New
Criticism.
From Eliot, Richards, and other critics, New Criticism borrows, amends,
and adds its own ideas and concerns. Although few of its advocates would
agree on many tenets, defirnitions, and techniques, a core of assumptions
does exist, thereby allowing us to identify adherents of this critical approach.
ASSUMPTIONS
New Critical assumption that a work artachieves its meaning through the
of
actions occur in the presence ofa catalyst, an element that causes, but is not
if we place hydrogen peroxide, a com
affected by, the reaction. For example,
mon household disinfectant, in a clear bottle and expose it to the sun's rays,
we will no longer have hydrogen peroxide. Acting as a catalyst, the sun's
rays will cause a chemical reaction to occur, breaking down the hydrogen
peroxide into its various parts, while the sun's rays remain unaffected.
mind serves as a catalyst for the reaction that yields
Similarly, the poet's
the poem. During the creative process, the poet's mind, serving as the cata
lyst, brings together the experiences of the author's personality. (not the
author's personality traits or attributes), into an external object and a new
creation: the poem. It is not the personality traits of the author that coalesce
to form thepoem, but the experiences of the author's personality. In distin
guishing between the personality and the mind of the poet, Eliot asserts that
the created entity, the poem, is about the experiences of the author that are
similar to all of our experiences. By structuring these experiences, the poem
allows us to examine them objectively.
Dismissing the poet's stated or supposed intentions as a means of dis
covering the text's meaning, the New Critics give little credence to the bio
graphical or contextual history of a poem. If the intentional fallacy is correct,
then unearthing biographical data will not help us ascertain a poem's mean
ing.Likewise, trying to place a poem in its social or political context will tell
us much social or political history about the time when the poem was au
thored. Although such information may indeed help in understanding the
poem's sociological or historical context, the poem's real meaning cannot re
side in this extrinsic or outside-the-text information.
Of particular importance to the New Critics is the etymology of individ
ual words. Because the words of a poem sometimes change meaning from
one time period to another, the critic often needs to conduct historical re
search, discovering what individual words meant at the time the poem was
written. For example, if a fifteenth-century poet called someone a "nice per
son," the New Critics would investigate the meaning of the word nice in
fifteenth-century usage, discovering thatat thattime nice meant foolish. The
Oxford English Dictionary (a dictionary that cites a word's multiple historical
meanings chronologically) becomes one of the New Critic's most used tools.
Placing little emphasison the author, the social context, ora text's histor
ical situation as a source for discovering a poem's meaning, the New Critics
social context of the poem, or even in the reader. Because the poem itself is
an artifact or an objective entity, its meaning must reside within its own
structure, within the poem Like all other
itself. objects, a poem and its struc
turecan be analyzed scientifically. Accordingly, careful scrutiny reveals that
a poem's structure operates according to a complex series of laws. By
closely analyzing this structure, the New Critics believe that they have de
vised a methodology and a standard of excellence that we can apply to all
to ascertain the structure of the poem, to see how it operates to achieve its
unity, and to discover how meaning evolves directly from the poem itself.
New Criticism sees the poet as an organizer of the content of human ex
perience. Structuring the poem around the often confusing and sometimes
contradictory experiences of life, the poet crafts the poem in such a way that
the text stirs its readers' emotions and causes its readers to reflect on the
poem's contents. As an artisan, the poet is most concerned with effectively
developing the poem's structure because the artist realizes that themeaning
of a work emerges from its structure. The poet's chief concern,maintain the
New Critics, ishow meaning is achieved through the various and sometimes
conflicting elements operating in the poem itself.
The chief characteristicof a poem-and therefore of its structureis co
herence or interrelatedness. Borrowing their ideas from the writings of
Samuel T. Coleridge (Biographia Literaria, 1817), the New Critics posit the
organic unity of a poem--that is, all parts of a poem are necessarily interre
lated, with each part reflecting and helping to support the poem's central
idea. Such organic unity allows for the harmonization of conflicting ideas,
feelings, and attitudes, and results in the poem's overall oneness. Superior
poetry, declare the New Critics, achieves such oneness through paradox,
irony,and ambiguity. Because such tensions are necessarily a part of every
one'slife, it is only fitting and appropriate, say the New Critics, that superior
poetry presents these tensions while at the same time showing how they are
resolved within the poem to achieve the tex's organic unity.
Because the poem's chief characteristicis its oneness, New Criticsbelieve
that a poem's form and content are inseparable. For the New Critics, form is
more than the external structure of a poem; a poem's form encompasses and
simultaneously rises above the usual definition of poetic structure (i.e.,
whether or not the poem isa Shakespearean or Petrarchan sonnet, or a lyric,
or any other poetic structure having meter, rhyme, orsome other poetic pat
tern). In New Criticism, form is defined as the overall effect the poem creates.
Because all the various parts of a poem combine to create this effect,each
poem's form is unique. When all the elements of a poem work together to
form a single,unified effect-the poem's form- New Critics declare that the
poet has written a successful or good poem,one that possesses organic unity.
Because all good and successful poems have organic unity, it would be
inconceivable to try to separate a poem's form and its content, maintain the
60 Chapter 3•Russian Formalism and New Criticism
New Critics. How can we what a poem says from how it says it?
separate
Because all the elements of a poem, both structural and aesthetic, work to
gether to achieve a poem's effect or form, it is impossible to discuss the over
all meaning of a poem by isolating or separating form and content.
For the New Critic,it is also inconceivable to believe that a poem's inter
pretation is equal to a mere paraphrased Labeling such an
version of the text.
METHODOLOGY
Believing in both the thematic and structural unity of a poem, New Critics
search fora poem's meaning within the text's structure by finding the tensions
and conflictsthat must eventually be resolved into a harmonious whole and
that inevitably lead to the creation of thepoem's chief effect. Such a search first
leads New Critics to the poem's diction or word choice. Unlike scientific dis
course with its precision of terminology, poetic diction often has multiple
meanings and immediately sets up a series of tensions within the text. For
example, many words have both a denotation, or dictionary meaning, and
connotation(s), or implied meanings. A word's denotation may be in direct
conflictwith its determined by the context of the poem.
connotative meaning
In addition, it may be difficult to differentiatebetween thevarious denotations
or connotations of a word. For example, if someone writes that "afat head
enjoys thefat of the land," the reader must note the various denotative and
connotative differences of the word fat. At the start of poetic analysis, then,
conflicts or tensions exist by the very nature of poetic diction.New Criticscall
is the critic's task to analyze the poetic diction to ascertain such tensions.
Although various New Critics give a variety of names to the poetic elements
that make up a poem's structure, all agree that the poem's meaning is de
rived from the oscillating tensions and conflicts that are brought to the sur
face through the poetic diction.
For example, Cleanth Brooks claims that the chief elements in a poem
are paradox and irony, two closely related terms that imply that a word or
phrase is qualified or even undercut by its context. By definition,a paradox
is a seemingly self-contradictorystatement that must be resolved on a higher
metaphysical level. The New Critics broaden this definition, maintaining
that literary language by its very nature is ambiguous. Literary discourse,
unlike normal or everyday larnguage, is able to sustain multiple meanings.
For Brooks, the discourse of poetry is "the language of paradox." Similarly,
the New Critics enhance the meaning of the word irony. Irony is a figre of
speech in which the words express a meaning that is often the direct opp0
site of their literal meaning. In New Criticism irony is the poet's ability to
recognize incongruities, and it becomes New Criticism's master trope be
cause it is essentialfor the production of paradox and ambiguity. Some New
Criticsuse the word tension to describe the opposition orconflictsoperating
within a text. For these critics, tension impliesthe conflicts between a word's
denotation and its connotation, between a literal detail and a figurative one,
and between an abstract and a concrete detail.
Because conflict, ambiguity, or tension controls the poem's structure, the
meaning of apoem can be discovered only by contextually analyzing the poetic
elements and diction. Furthermore, because context governs meaning, mearn
ings of individual words or phrases are necessarily context related and unique
to the poem in which they occur.It is the task of the critic to unravel the various
apparent conflicts and tensions within each poem and ultimately to show that
the poem possesses organic unity,thereby demonstrating how all parts of the
poem are interrelated and support the poem's chief paradox. This paradox,
which New Critics often call form or overall effect, can usually be expressed in
one sentence thatcontains the main tension and theresolution of that tension.It
is this "key idea" to which all other elements of the poem must relate.
Although most New Critics would agree that the process of discovering
the poem's form is not necessarily linear (because advanced readers often
see ambiguities and ironies upon a first reading of a text), New Criticism
provides the reader with a distinct methodology to discover a text'scentral
paradox or tension. These guided stepsallow both novices and advanced lit
erary scholars to enter the discussion of a text'sultimate meaning, each con
tributing to the poem's interpretation.From a New Critical perspective, one
begins the journey of discovering a text's correct or valid interpretation by
reading the poem several times and by carefully noting the work's title (if it
has one) and its relationship to the text. Then, by following the prescribed
steps listed here, the readercan ascertain a text's meaning. The more practice
62 Chapter 3•Russian Formalism and New Criticism
Step 2 Examine all allusions found within the text by tracing their roots to thepri
mary text or source,if possible.
Step 3 Analyze all images, symbols, and figures of speech within the text. Note
the relationships, if any, among the elements,both within the same cate
gory (e.g, between images) and among the various elements (e.g., be
tween an image and a symbol).
Step 4 Examine and analyze the various structural patterns that appear within
the text, including the technical aspectsof prosody, or the principles that
govern thewriting of poetry, such as rhyme, meter,rhythm, and so forth.
Note how the poet manipulates metrical devices, grammatical construc
tions, tonal patterns,and syntactic patterns of words, phrases,clauses, or
sentences.Determine how these various patterns interrelate with each
other and with all elements discussed in steps1 to 3.
Step 5 Consider such elements as tone, theme, point of view, and any other ele
ment-dialogue, foreshadowing, narration, parody, setting, and so forth
that directly relate to the text's dramatic situation.
Step 6 Look for interrelationships of all elements stated in steps 1-5, noting
where tensions, ambiguities,or paradoxes arise.
Step 7 After carefully examining all of the above, state the poem's chief, overar
ching tension, and explain how the poem achieves its dominant effect by
resolving this tension.
Because all poems are unique, the process of uncovering a poem's chief
tension is also unique. By using the prescribed methodology of New
Criticism, New Criticsbelieve that readers will be able to justify their inter
pretations of a text with information gleaned from the text alone while en
joying the aestheticprocess that allows them to articulatethe meaning. text's
and that the poem provides all the necessary information for revealing
itself
its meaning. By scrutinizing the text and giving it a close reading, and by
providing readers with a setof norms that will assist them in discovering the
correctinterpretationof the text, New Criticismprovides a teachable,workable
framework for literary analysis.
If the text has a title, what is the relationship of the title to the rest of the poem?
Before answering this question,New Critical theory and practice assume that
the critic has read the text severaltimes.
What allusions, if any,are in the text? Trace these allusions to their appropriate
sources and explore how the origins of the allusions help elucidate meaning in
this particular text.
Whatsymbols, images, and figures of speech are used? What is the relationship
between any symbol and/or image? Between an image and another image?
Between a figure of speech and an image? A symbol?
What elements of prosody can you note and discuss?Look for rhyme,meter,and
stanza patterns.
What is the tone of the work?
From what pointof view is the contentof the text being told?