New Criticism

NC dominated lit theory in early 20th century: one of most important English-speaking contributions to lit. crit. analysis. Of course, also most important in creating a canon made up of dead white men and perpetuating a patriarchal system in criticism--which most of us are not aware of until someone points it out!

NC is a reaction to 19th century approaches, most of which depend on extrinsic analysis:

• Romantics who looked at the author
• Historical and biographical criticism--esp mid-century with evolutionary theory and the idea of progress or growth (almost back to the Enlightenment ideal about things going toward perfection H. Spencer: from incoherent homogeneity to coherent heterogeneity and H Taine: influence of race, environment, and epoch)
• impressionistic at the end of century--how something affects the author to give him an individual vision which he then reports truthfully and honestly--in America another form of Romantic Individualist [note this impressive school will sound like reader response from the other end]
• expressive school--the author's experiences evidenced in text
• naturalism which often has to do with materialistic determinism--sees the sensational in the everyday life, sees violence and passion, reports in detail, deals with the lower classes of society

• a poem is a concrete entity
• a poem can be analyzed to discover its true or correct meaning independent of its author's intention or emotional state, or the values and beliefs of either its author or its reader
• it is autotelic--no end beyond its own existence
• "text and text only
• John Crowe Ransom describes ontological critic and coins name in text The New Criticism 1941

• intentional fallacy--thinking meaning is nothing more than an expresion of the private experiences or intentions of the author; instead, every poem must be a public text
• Affective fallacy--confuses poem's meaning with poem's effect on reader--the reader's response
• Wimsatt and Beardsley--Verbal Icon (1954)

• objective correlative: 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 (T. S. Eliot's coined term and definition)
• "Because the poem is an impersonal formulation of common feelings and emotions, the successful poem unites the poet's impressions and ideas with those common to all humanity, producing a text that is not a mere reflection of the poet's personal feelings." (Bressler 40)

• borrowed idea of organic form from Coleridge
• for New Critics, "form is the overall effect the poem creates (Bressler 43)
• harmonization of all conflicts and tensions residing in diction, structure, etc.
• heresy of paraphrase--poem can never be the same as a simple paraphrase of poem because structure and meaning are inseparable (term used by Wellek and Brooks
• method for interpreting a poem is through "close reading," a term coined by I.A. Richards as descriptive of the method he taught his students (looking for minute details in every aspect of the poem)

Methodology:
1) Examine diction (denotation, connotation, etymology)
2) Examine all allusions
3) Analyze all images, symbols, figures of speech
4) Examine structural patterns, such as meter, rhyme scheme, grammar
5) Consider tone, theme, point of view, any other literary elements
6) Look for the interrelationships of all elements (note tensions, ambiguities, paradoxes)
7) Identify the chief paradox (point of tension and its resolution)

Other names for school: Modernism, formalism, aesthetic criticism, textual criticism

Many believe that this theory works best for genre of poetry and does not translate well to narrative or drama

A contemporary criticism of this school of thought:

• it's not a theory, but a judgment (that's what causes the elitism) about what the great works of literature are based on a close reading analysis--what they contain in terms of "difficulty" such as irony, paradoxes, ambiguities, etc.