New Criticism

                                    New Criticism

              Anglo American variety of Formalist Criticism earned its title ‘New Criticism’ by the publication of John Crowe Ransom’s The New Criticism in 1941. It emerged in the 1930s and dominated from 1940s through the 1960s. New criticism perceives the literary work as an autonomous, timeless, verbal object whose unity and meaning are constituted by formal and rhetorical features, and that it is free from any burden of reflection on the social world in which it is produced or from any connection to the author who produces it. The prominent New Critics are John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate, Robert Pen Warren, R. P. Blackmur, William K. Wimsatt and Manroe C. Beardsley, F. R. Leavis etc.

The origins of New Criticism can be traced back in the writings of Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot and in the Practical Criticism of I. A. Richards and his disciple William Empson.

The New Criticism opposes the biographical - historical criticism. ‘The text itself’ became the manifesto of the New Critical effort to focus the reader’s attention on the literary text and nothing else. 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. But they do not provide the literary critic with information that can be used to analyze the text itself.

The New Critics Wimsatt and Beardsley pointed out two kinds of mistakes while analysing a literary text. They are Intentional Fallacy and Affective Fallacy.

  Intentional Fallacy

 Wimsatt and Beardsley proposed this idea in their work The Verbal Icon (1954). According to them the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art. Knowing the author’s intention tells us nothing about the text itself. The term Intentional Fallacy refers to the mistaken belief that the author’s intention is the same as the text’s meaning. This fallacy signifies what is claimed to be the error of interpreting and evaluating a literary work by reference to evidence outside the text itself, or the intention- the design and purpose- of its author.

The meaning, structure and value of a text are inherent within the finished, freestanding and public work of literature itself, not outside.

 Affective Fallacy

            The New Critics coined the term Affective Fallacy to refer to the mistaken belief that the emotional effects upon the readers constitute the text’s meaning. Wimsatt and Beardsley defined Affective Fallacy as the error of evaluating a poem by its effects especially its emotional effects upon the reader. As a result of this fallacy “the poem itself, as an object of specifically critical judgment tends to disappear.” So that criticism ends in in impressionism and relativism.

While the Intentional Fallacy confuses the text with its origins, the Affective Fallacy confuses the text with its effects that is with the emotions it produces.

 In New Criticism, a literary text is a verbal object with its own autonomy. The literary text says the same, despite the multiplicity of readers and readings. Its meaning is as objective as its physical existence on the page, for it is constructed of 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. This is why New Criticism asserted that the meaning of a poem could not be explained simply by paraphrasing it; a practice Brooks referred to as “the heresy of paraphrase”.

For New Criticism, the complexity of a text is created by the multiple and often conflicting meanings woven through it and these meanings is a product of four kinds of linguistic devices: paradox, irony, ambiguity and tension.

  Paradox

            It is a statement that seems self-contradictory but represents the actual way things are. Example: Conclusion of Donne’s sonnet “Death, Be Not Proud”.

“One short sleep past, we wake eternally

 And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.”

New critics expanded the term from its application to a type of figurative language. It is in this sense that Cleanth Brooks is able to claim “the language of poetry is the language of paradox”.

Irony

            It is a statement in which the meaning that a speaker implies differs sharply from the meaning that is apparently expressed.

 Example: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” Here a single woman is in want of a rich husband. Brooks defined irony as a Central principle of poetic language.

 Ambiguity

             It occurs when a word, image or event generates two or more different meanings. Example: Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet “Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man.”

Here the word grave is used as a pun. So it creates some ambiguity.

 Tension

Tension is created by the integration of the abstract and the concrete, of general ideas embodied in specific images. The multiple and conflicting meanings produced by the text’s paradoxes, ironies, ambiguities and tensions must be resolved.

Along with this the denotation and connotation also creates a complexity of meaning. These terms were contributed by Allen Tate. Denotation is the dictionary meaning of a term. Connotation is the implied meaning.

 Close Reading or Explication

            It is the detailed examination of the complex relationship between a text’s formal elements and its theme. It is through this method that the New Critics established the text’s organic unity. In this reading strategy all kinds of information relevant to the full understanding of a word or passage like the linguistic devices of paradox, irony, ambiguity and tension are analysed to understand the unity of the text. An analysis of all kinds of figurative language including images, symbols, metaphors and similes is done ignoring the intentions of the author and the emotional effects in the readers. Close reading can be seen as a careful and purposeful reading with a thesis to prove or an existing idea to disapprove on the basis of textual evidences alone.

 

Criticism

1. Being ahistorical and apolitical

2. Less objective

3. Questioned the idea of fixity of meaning of the verbal icons

4. Reductionism which ultimately results in in a version of impressionist criticism.

Assessment Test

By clicking on the following link you can attend an online quiz on New Criticism:

https://forms.gle/nwpVmJo58QMJRGyT6


 


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