New Criticism

 Introduction:
 
New Criticism: is a method that provides the reader with a formula (or a way) for arriving at
the correct interpretation of a text using only the text itself.
 
This method gives the reader an objective approach for discovering a text’s meaning
regardless of his\her level.
 
The name New Criticism became widely used to describe this approach to understanding
literature with the publication of John Crowe Ransom’s New Criticism in 1941, which also
contained Ransom’s personal analysis of several of his contemporary theorists and critics.
 
Ransom’s principles is to seek for an ontological critic, one that would recognize a poem (use
it as a synonym in New Criticism for any literary work) a concrete unit like Leonardo da
Vinci’s Mona Lisa.
 
A text can be analyzed to discover its true or correct meaning independent of it’s author’s
intention, or the emotional state, or the values and beliefs of either its author or reader.
 
New Criticism and its adherents (called New Critics) are an eclectic group, which develops
this literary method while having a common core of basic ideas.
 
Historical Development:
 
Formalism (New Criticism) focuses on intrinsic (form and text), rather than extrinsic (history
and biography) criticism.
 
Other forms of criticism were mixed with this emphasis on history and biography:
Impressionism: appreciating the text for its beauty.
Naturalism: a naturalistic view of life that emphasizes the importance of scientific thought in
literary analysis.
 
New Humanism: valued the moral qualities of art.
Romanticism (expressive school): values the individual artist's feelings, attitudes and
experiences as evidenced in the text.
 
New Criticism:
 
New Criticism rejected all these previous extrinsic views.
 
Being formalists, the New Critics adopt what many call "the text and the text alone"
approach to literary analysis.
 
Because many of the practitioners of this formalistic criticism disagree with each other
concerning the various elements that make up the poem, it is difficult to cite a definitive list
of critics who consider themselves New Critics.
 
Among those critics who hold some of the same New Critical assumptions concerning poetic
analysis are: John Crowe Ransom, T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, Robert Penn Warren, and
Cleanth Brooks.
 
Warren and Brooks' Understanding Poetry (1938).
 
Two critics that helped lay the foundation for New Criticism:
 
T. S. Eliot:
 
Criticism should be directed toward the poem, not the poet.
 
Poetry is an escape from the poet's emotions (impersonal, common to all humanity).
 
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.
 
I. A. Richards:
 
Practical criticism: an intricate system for arriving at a poem's meaning, including a close
reading of the text.
 
The Methodology
How to become a Formalist (New Critic)?
 
Every one, whether a normal or an advanced reader, can follow certain steps, which New
Critics have carefully entitled, in order to correctly analyze and assert a text’s meaning. What
are these steps?
 
Read the text many times.
Associate the work’s title with the text itself.
Carefully note the diction (word choice).
Locate any possible allusions in the text and relate them to their original sources.
Search for images and symbols and relate them with each other.
Look for elements of prosody, such as: rhyme, rhythm, stanzas, meter, language and style.
Examine the tone, speaker (narrator), theme, setting and point of view.
Are there any paradoxes? Ambiguities? Tensions? Ironies? Or conflicts?
Finally, put all the clues (elements), which helped in developing the text, in front of you. Re-
associate them with the complexities of the whole text. Explain the text’s meaning, thus by
resolving its tensions.
 
Just a little more practice and a bit more effort and you can become a professional or
advanced textual analysisit. Good Luck 
 
The assumptions of formalists:
 
1) Science vs. Literature:
 
- New Criticism begins by assuming that imaginative literature is valuable.
- To Study poetry or any literary work means engaging oneself in an aesthetic experience
that can lead to truth.
- The truth that is discoverable from an aesthetic experience differs from that   truth that
science provides us.
-  Science speaks propositionally telling us weather a statement is true or       false however,
poetic truth involves the use of intuition and imagination which is a form of truth that is
discernible only in poetry.
 
2) The poem:
 
-  New critics begin by defining a poem as an object which has an ontological status. In effect
a poem becomes an artifact, an objective, self contained, autonomous entity with its own
structure as W. K. Wimsatt declares that a poem becomes a verbal icon.
    - The formalist's objective theory of art: as a poem is an object of its own then a poem must
not be equated with the author's feelings or implied intentions.
 
3) The Poem vs. the Poet:
 
-  According to New Critics believing that a poem's meaning is not more than an expression
of a private experience or intentions of the author's feelings is committing a fundamental
error of interpretation called the Intentional Fallacy.
 - New Critics also believe that a poem must be a public text that can be understood.
-  We cannot deny that a poem is related to the author as T.S. Eliot states that a poem's mind
serves as a catalyst for the reaction that yields the poem.
 
4) The real meaning of a poem:
 
- New critics give little importance to the biographical or contextual history of the poem
arguing that the poem's real meaning cannot reside in this extrinsic or outside the text
information.
- New critics also argue that a reader's emotional response to the text is neither important nor
equivalent to the interpretation of it and such an error in judgment is called the Affective
Fallacy.
   - A poem and its structure can be analyzed scientifically and New Critics believe that they
have devised a methodology and a standard of excellence that we can apply to discover their
correct meaning.
- They also believe that the poet is an organizer of the human experience.
- The chief characteristic of the poem is the coherence and interrelatedness of its structure.
 
5) The Organic Unity and the Oneness of the poem:
 
-  New critics borrow their ideas from Samuel T. Coleridge in forming what they call the
Organic Unity of a poem which is the concept in which all parts of the poem are interrelated
and interconnected with each part reflecting and helping to support the central idea of the
poem.
- The Organic Unity allows the harmonization of conflicting ideas, feelings, and attitudes and
results in the poem's oneness.
-  New Critics declare that superior poetry achieves such oneness through paradox, irony,
and ambiguity.
- Because the poem's chief characteristics it its oneness, New Critics believe that a poem's
form and content are inseparable.
-  They also believe that form is more than the external structure of the poem however it is
the overall effect that the poem creates.
-  They believe that all the elements of the poem both structural and aesthetic work together
to achieve a poem's effect or form, it is impossible to discuss the overall meaning of the poem
by isolating or separating form and content.
- Finally it is also impossible to the New Critic to believe that a poem's interpretation is equal
to a mere paraphrased version of the text.