Republic of the Philippines

CAVITE STATE UNIVERSITY

Cavite College of Arts and Trades Campus
Rosario, Cavite

NEW CRITICISM

INTRODUCTION

What is New Criticism?

New Criticism was a formalist movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in
the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover
how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object.

The movement derived its name from John Crowe Ransom’s 1941 book The New Criticism. Also very
influential were the critical essays of T. S. Eliot, such as “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and
“Hamlet and His Problems,” in which Eliot developed his notion of the “objective correlative.”

New Criticism emphasizes explication, or "close reading," of "the work itself." New Critics believed the
structure and meaning of the text were intimately connected and should not be analyzed separately. New
Criticism aimed at bringing a greater intellectual rigour to literary studies, confining itself to careful
scrutiny of the text alone and the formal structures of paradox, ambiguity, irony, and metaphor, among
others.

In a nutshell, New Criticism:

 emphasizes explication, or "close reading," of "the work itself."

 rejects attention to biographical and sociological matters.
 examines the relationships between a text's ideas and its form, between what a text says and the
way it says it.
 attempts to be a science of literature, with a technical vocabulary.
 asserts that the goal of literature is not the pursuit of sincerity or authenticity, but subtlety, unity,
and integrity--and these are properties of the text, not the author.
 functions under the assumption that the work is not the author's; it was detached at birth. The
author's intentions are "neither available nor desirable" (nor even to be taken at face value when
supposedly found in direct statements by authors). Meaning exists on the page, and on the page
only.
 advocated for treating the text as separate from the author’s intentions and the readers’
impressions
The Role of the Author

Authors in the New Criticism

The Intentional Fallacy:

It does not matter what the author intended. He/she is not the final authority on the text. The text itself is.
Readers can interpret the text without concern for whether that interpretation was “intended”.

THE EMERGENCE OF NEW CRITICISM

John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974) was an

American Literary critic. He was the founder of
New Criticism. New criticism was a formalist
movement that emphasized the “closed reading” of
the text. It argues that the words on the page are the
most important elements within the analysis.

John Crowe Ransom’s New Criticism, 1941,

proposes the following ideas – text becomes the
focus of closed reading. The analysis of a text has to
be scientific and precise. Personal, historical, moral
and biographical details around a text are all
rejected in the field of New Criticism.

The idea was to take the focus of the reader closer to

things inside a text rather than things outside of a
text. So, a lot of information that exists outside a
text is rejected through New Criticism. The idea is
similar to I.A. Richard’s “closed-reading” approach.

New criticism focused on the purity of a text and the purity of the act of reading, analyzing without
bothering about historical or political perspectives around the text. It takes the idea of text as an isolated
cerebral process away from politics, morality, history, etc.
SELF-ASSESSMENT EXERCISE

How is John Crowe Ransom significant to New Criticism theory?

In short, Ransom’s position is that the critic must study literature, not about literature. Hence
criticism should exclude:

(1) personal impressions, because the critical activity should “cite the nature of the object rather
than its effects upon the subject”;

(2) synopsis and paraphrase, since the plot or story is an abstraction from the real content of the
text;

(3) historical studies, which might include literary backgrounds, biography, literary sources, and
analogues;

(4) linguistic studies, which include identifying allusions and meanings of words;

(5) moral content, since this is not the whole content of the text;

(6) “Any other special studies which deal with some abstract or prose content taken out of the
work”.

All in all, he argues that literature and literary criticism should enjoy autonomy both ontologically and
institutionally. His arguments have often been abbreviated into a characterization of New Criticism as
focusing on “the text itself” or “the words on the page”.

Assumptions in New Criticism

 You can’t know for sure what an author intended, and an individual’s response is
unstable and subjective: The work itself should be your focus.
 The purpose of this focus is to explain the work’s organic unity – how every feature,
large and small, contributes to its meaning.
 Great literary works are marked by some kind of complexity, as levels of meaning,
oppositions, tensions, ironies, and ambiguities are unified.

SELF- ASSESSMENT EXERCISE

What Literary text attracts exponents of New Criticism most?

New Critics were attracted to literary texts that are accessible to modern readers. They believed that their
method of analyzing literature was easy to understand and even “democratic” as they mention that anyone
could appreciate and interpret once they learned how.

In new criticism, critics use their theories to judge the qualities of a good literature. They believe that a
good work must contain
a. Network of paradoxes
b. Unity
 Unity is achieved by balancing and harmonizing the conflicting ideas in the literary work.
 critics favors complex yet unified works.
 They prefer to use difficult works, because it is illogical and troubling material. So they
downgrade those simple works because they believe it lacks in unity

To Apply New Criticism:

1. Start by examining the text for its form.
In other words, how is it structured? What aspects of how it’s written—literary devices,
organization, point of view, etc.—are most important to creating meaning within the text?
2. Choose one or two specific aspects of the text to focus on.
Be sure your focus isn’t too broad! (For example, you might focus on blindness/vision as a motif,
or choose a couple of motifs, or one or two types of imagery that pop up often…but you DON’T want to
focus on motifs in general, symbolism in general, imagery in general…)
3. Identify how that aspect (or those aspects) of the text affect the meaning of the piece.
You can use a variation of one of the following sentence-starters to articulate your observation:

 The use of (literary technique or aspect of form) in (chapter/scene) of (title) by (author)

o creates a sense of (tone or mood)…
o communicates the idea that (theme/message), OR...
o connects (a couple of different concepts) to (create tone or mood OR communicate theme).
CONCLUSION

Typical questions you might answer in a New Criticism analysis:

 How does the work use imagery to develop its own symbols? (i.e. making a certain road stand for death
by constant association)

 What is the quality of the work's organic unity "...the working together of all the parts to make an
inseparable whole..." (Tyson 121)? In other words, does how the work is put together reflect what it is?

 How are the various parts of the work interconnected?

 How do paradox, irony, ambiguity, and tension work in the text?

 How do these parts and their collective whole contribute to or not contribute to the aesthetic quality of
the work?

 How does the author resolve apparent contradictions within the work?

 What does the form of the work say about its content?

 Is there a central or focal passage that can be said to sum up the entirety of the work?

 How do the rhythms and/or rhyme schemes of a poem contribute to the meaning or effect of the piece?
 Submitted by:
Armijo, Roselyn Jam T.
de Jesus, Salve Amore
Gonez, Angelu
Martinez, Michelle
Sernat, Joyce E.