New Criticism

New Criticism emphasizes explication, or "close reading," of "the work itself." It

rejects old historicism's attention to biographical and sociological matters. Instead, the
objective determination as to "how a piece works" can be found through close focus
and analysis, rather than through extraneous (not important) and erudite (knowledge
that is learned by studying) special knowledge. It has long been the pervasive
(existing in many parts) and standard approach to literature in college and high school
curricula.

New Criticism, incorporating Formalism, examines the relationships between a text's

ideas and its form, between what a text says and the way it says it. New Critics "may
find tension, irony, or paradox in this relation, but they usually resolve it into unity
and coherence of meaning" (Biddle 100). New Criticism attempts to be a science of
literature, with a technical vocabulary, some of which we all had to learn in junior
high school English classes (third-person, denoument, etc.). Working with patterns of
sound, imagery, narrative structure, point of view, and other techniques discernible on
close reading of the text, they seek to determine the function and appropriateness of
these to the self-contained work.

New Critics, especially American ones in the 1940s and 1950s, attacked the standard
notion of "expressive realism," the romantic fallacy that literature is the efflux of a
noble soul, that for example love pours out onto the page in 14 iambic pentameter
lines rhyming ABABCD etc. The goal then is not the pursuit of sincerity or
authenticity, but subtlety, unity, and integrity--and these are properties of the text, not
the author. 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.
Thus, New Critics insist that the meaning of a text is intrinsic and should not be
confused with the author's intentions nor the work's affective dimension (its
impressionistic effects on the reader). The "intentional fallacy" is when one confuses
the meaning of a work with the author's purported intention (expressed in letters,
diaries, interviews, for example). The "affective fallacy" is the erroneous practice of
interpreting texts according to the psychological or emotional responses of readers,
confusing the text with its results.

To do New Critical reading, ask yourself, "How does this piece work?" Look for
complexities in the text: paradoxes, ironies, ambiguities. Find a unifying idea or
theme which resolves these tensions.
New Criticism is one of several ways of looking at and analyzing literature. In this lesson, find out
what it is, go through some examples of reading with a New Critic's eye, and take a quiz to check
your understanding.

Definition and Origins of New Criticism

How would you want people to judge you - based off what they've previously heard about you, or
your words and actions as you interact with them? Most people would want to be judged off their
own words and actions. Even though our histories and reputations are important, there's a reason
why we hear again and again not to 'judge a book by its cover.'
According to New Criticism, we should judge books the same way. Rather than worrying about the
author's background or our own reactions to a book, we should evaluate work based only on the text
itself. Since we're only dealing with the text, we'd be doing what's called a close reading, which
requires taking apart a text and looking at its individual elements, such as theme, setting, plot, and
structure, for example.
Prior to the 1920s, literary criticism took a largely historical slant. To understand a text, critics often
looked to its historical background and the history of the language used in the text. But in 1929, a
literary critic at Cambridge by the name of Ivor Armstrong Richards published Practical Criticism. His
book reported on an experiment that involved people reading and responding to poems without
knowing who the authors were. Richards was interested in why people responded to these poems
the way they did.
In 1939, Richards began teaching at Harvard and influenced a new American literary theory. Two
years later, John Crowe Ransom, an English professor at Kenyon College, published New Criticism.
The new book's title was applied to this young method of examining texts. New Criticism went on to
become a popular method of literary analysis throughout the middle of the 20th century.

What Exactly Do New Critics Do?

In focusing on the text itself, New Critics intentionally ignore the author and the reader.
According to intentional fallacy, it's impossible to determine an author's reasons for writing a text
without directly asking him or her. And even if we did determine the author's intentions, they don't
matter, because the text itself carries its own value. So, even if we're reading a book by a renowned
author like Shakespeare, we shouldn't let the author's reputation taint our evaluation of the text.
Similarly, affective fallacy claims that we shouldn't waste time thinking about the effect a text may
have on the reader, because then we're polluting the text with our own personal baggage. So, we
should ignore how 'beautiful' a poem may be or our reactions to an emotional novel such as Where
the Red Fern Grows. If we give in to our emotional reactions, we're less able to evaluate the text
objectively.
Besides authors and readers, New Critics would also argue that a text's historical and cultural
contexts are also irrelevant. For example, even if we're looking at such a culturally significant text,
such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, we should avoid the temptation to read it as an
anti-slavery novel. Instead, we should read it to see how the novel's elements, such as its setting
and theme, work together to produce a unified, whole text.
Green Eggs and Ham and New Criticism
Let's take Dr. Seuss's Green Eggs and Ham as an example and evaluate it as New Critics. Although
it may be a bit silly, it's a good place to start.
The story revolves around the conflict between an unnamed protagonist and Sam. The plot occurs in
two main acts. In the first act, Sam tries to convince the protagonist to eat green eggs and ham in a
variety of circumstances, despite the protagonist's constant refusal. In the second act, the
protagonist declares his love of green eggs and ham and says he would eat them in any and all of
the circumstances Sam has previously proposed.
The first act takes up the majority of the book. It's not until almost the book's end that the protagonist
finally tries green eggs and ham and discovers that he likes them. The book, therefore, is mainly a
story of pursuit and persuasion.
Sam's stanzas are shorter than the protagonists. The difference in the length of their speech
emphasizes the protagonist's refusal to try something new and makes Sam almost a fleeting,
mysterious character.
While the stanzas are of different lengths, the rhyme scheme also changes often. For example, the
protagonist's early lines in the book follow an 'abab' rhyme scheme, but he later switches to 'aabb.'
So, Dr. Seuss uses rhyme schemes for variety rather than to differentiate the two characters.
New Criticism would disregard what the story's moral may be or that it may have been written to
encourage children to try new things. New Critics would also avoid comparing Green Eggs and
Ham to any of Dr. Seuss's other books. Such intertextual examinations would take away from our
examination of this text.

n
New Criticism, post-World War I school of Anglo-American literary critical
theory that insisted on theintrinsic value of a work of art and focused attention on the
individual work alone as an independent unit of meaning. It was opposed to the
critical practice of bringing historical or biographical data to bear on the interpretation
of a work.
The primary technique employed in the New Critical approach is
close analytic reading of the text, a technique as old as Aristotle’s Poetics. The New
Critics, however, introduced refinements into the method. Early seminal works in the
tradition were those of the English critics I.A. Richards (Practical Criticism, 1929)
and William Empson (Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1930). English poet T.S. Eliot also
made contributions, with his critical essays “Tradition and the Individual Talent”
(1917) and “Hamlet and His Problems” (1919). The movement did not have a name,
however, until the appearance of John Crowe Ransom’s The New Criticism (1941), a
work that loosely organized the principles of this basically linguistic approach to
literature. Other figures associated with New Criticism include Cleanth Brooks, R.P.
Blackmur, Robert Penn Warren, and W.K. Wimsatt, Jr., although their critical
pronouncements, along with those of Ransom, Richards, and Empson, are
somewhat diverse and do not readily constitute a uniform school of thought. New
Criticism was eclipsed as the dominant mode of Anglo-American literary criticism by
the 1970s.
To the New Critics, poetry was a special kind of discourse, a means of communicating
feeling and thought that could not be expressed in any other kind of language. It
differed qualitatively from the language of science or philosophy, but it conveyed
equally valid meanings. Such critics set out to define and formalize the qualities of
poetic thought and language, utilizing the technique of close reading with special
emphasis on the connotative and associative values of words and on the multiple
functions of figurative language—symbol, metaphor, and image—in the work. Poetic
form and content could not be separated, since the experience of reading the particular
words of a poem, including its unresolved tensions, is the poem’s “meaning.” As a
result, any rewording of a poem’s language alters its content, a view articulated in the
phrase “the heresy of paraphrase,” which was coined by Brooks in his The Well
Wrought Urn (1947).