New criticism

Name given to a style of criticism advocated by a group of academics writing in the first half of the 20th century.

origin

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

The criticism of t s Eliot

Theories of I A Richards

Practice of William Empson

Definition

texts as autonomous and “closed,” meaning that everything that is needed to understand a work is present within it. The reader does not need outside sources, such as the author’s biography, to fully understand a text.

Methods previous to new criticism

Extrinsic analysis—historical/biographical

Moral and philosophical --New humanist

Impressionist critics ,expressive school

Critics of first seminal

I A Richards (Practical Criticism)William Empson (Seven Types of Ambiguity)T S Eliot “ Hamlet And His Problems” “Traditional and The Individual

Talent”

CRITICS OF SECOND SEMINAL

Cleanth Brooks

R.P. Blackmur

Robert Penn Warren

W.K. Wimsat

Phenomena Actions, and Interpretive Practices New Criticism opposed as Irrelevant to Literary Criticism

author's intention ,biographical fallacy ,genetic fallacy, reader's affective response impressionism ,relativism ,paraphrase heresy of paraphrase, poem as artifact vs. poem as meaning

Attributes of poems' language ("figures") you should seek by "close reading" in "objective" or "intrinsic criticism" (New Criticism)

Irony ,ambiguity, paradox ,denotation, implication (vs. inference), connotation

image symbol (image with literal and figurative meaning)

metaphor or simile (image with only figurative meaning

Difference between early and later stage of new criticism

irony, ambiguity, and paradox are only a few of the poetic figures which a New Critical reading might discover implying thematic connotations implied in a poem , but in the early history of New Criticism, they were the most commonly discovered strategies by which poems resolved their ‘tensions into themes of universal significance’

New Criticism -- Methods

From parts to an organic whole

1. finding the tensions and conflicts, ambiguity, paradox, irony

2. connotation and denotations

3. poetic elements: metaphor, simile, personification, prosody,

4. narrative elements: tone, point of view, narrative structure

What comes after New Criticism

1. Textuality rather than text; placing the text back in its context

2. seeing the author and reader as conditioned subject, but not godlike "creator" able to transcend their socio-historical conditions

3. seeing gaps, but not totality out of the text; challenging the text

Published Examples

IA Richard's Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgement (1929).

Cleanth Brooks's The Well Wrought Urn (1947).

Michael Schmidt and Grevel Lindop‘ s British Poetry Since 1960 (1972).

Calvin Bendient‘ s Eight Contemporary Poets (1974).

P.R. King's Nine Contemporary Poets: A Critical Introduction (1979).

Christopher Ricks‘ s The Force of Poetry (1987