NEW CRITICISM F.
As an organizer of the content of human
➢ The New Criticism, with its emphasis on unity
and form, is the direct descendant of the
aesthetic theories of the romantic poets (and
the philosopher-critics before them).
➢ Samuel Taylor Coleridge believed that the
spirit of poetry must “embody in order to reveal
itself; but a living body is of necessity an
organized one—and what is organization but
the connection of parts to a whole, so that
each part is at once end and means!”
➢ Coleridge: “Form was not simply the visible,
external shape of literature,” but it was
something “organic,” “innate.”
➢ Eliot’s explanation of how emotion is
expressed in art—by finding an 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”.
➢ From Richards, New Criticism borrowed a term
that has become synonymous with its methods
of analysis: practical criticism. Richard’s
experiment at Cambridge University resulted in
the identified difficulties that poetry presents to
its readers: matters of interpretation, poetic
techniques, and specific meanings. From this
analysis, Richards devised an intricate system
for arriving at a poem’s meaning— close
scrutiny or close reading of a text.
A. Objective theory of art, poem being an object
in its own right; its meaning must not be equated
with its author’s feelings or stated or implied
intentions, otherwise there is a danger of
committing the fundamental error of interpretation
known as Intentional Fallacy.
B. The poem is somehow related to its author
cannot be denied (T.S. Eliot’s essay “Tradition and
the Individual Talent). The poet’s mind serves as a
catalyst for the reaction that yields the poem.
C. A reader’s emotional response to the text is
neither important nor equivalent to its interpretation.
An error in judgment, Affective Fallacy, confuses
what a poem is (its meaning) with what it does.
D. Because the poem itself is an artifact or an
objective entity, its meaning must reside within its
own structure.
E. Like all other objects, a poem and its structure
can be analyzed scientifically.
experience, the poet’s chief concern is how
meaning is achieved through the various and
sometimes conflicting elements operating in the
poem itself.
G. The chief characteristic of the poem and
therefore its structure is coherence or
interrelatedness—organic unity (all parts of a
poem are interrelated and interconnected).
H. Superior poetry achieves oneness through
paradox, irony, and ambiguity.
I. A poem’s form and content are inseparable.
Form is more than the external structure of a poem,
for a poem’s form encompasses but rises above
the usual definition of poetic structure.
J. When all the elements of a poem work together
to form a single, unified effect—the poem’s form—
the poet has written a successful poem, one that
has organic unity.
K. It is inconceivable to believe that a poem’s
interpretation is equal to a mere paraphrased
version of the text. Such an erroneous belief is
known as Heresy of Paraphrase, a poem is not
simply a true or false statement, but a bundle of
harmonized tensions and resolved stresses than a
statement of prose.
RUSSIAN FORMALISM
➢ Critics involved with the formalist movement
that took place in the United States and the
Russian formalists are sometimes thought to
be members of the same group, or at least
closely related, because of the movements’
similar names.
➢ The latter flourished in Moscow and St.
Petersburg in the 1920s, and although the
principles they espoused have some similarity
to those of the New Critics, they are two
separate schools.
➢ Because the work of the Russian formalists
was based on the theories of Ferdinand de
Saussure, the French linguist, they are
probably more closely related to the
structuralists, who were to garner attention in
the 1950s and 1960s.
➢ The most important thing is to find out the
‘literariness’ in it as Roman Jakobson wrote in
1921: ‘The object of study in literary science is
not literature but ‘literariness’, that is which
makes a given work a literary work.
➢ They rejected the role of intuition, imagination,
and genius in the production of a literary work.
➢ For them literary devices like ambiguity,
metaphor, parallelism, imagery, personification,
allusion, diction, paradox, epigraph,
foreshadowing, alliteration, and euphemism
are the most important elements of a literary
work.
➢ Shklovsky: “The literary work is the sum total of
literary devices.”
➢ Russian Formalism invented two most
important terms while analyzing a work of
literature: (1) Defamiliarization and (2)
Foregrounding.
➢ These two play very important role in the
production of literary works. Shklovsky is the
main figure who talked about defamiliarization
in his seminal book Art as Technique (1917).
➢ Defamiliarization (or ostranenie): “To
defamiliarize is to make fresh, new, strange,
different what is familiar and known.” It also
refers to the literary device whereby language
is used in such a way that ordinary and familiar
objects are made to look different.
➢ In literary studies and stylistics, foregrounding
is the linguistic strategy of calling attention to
certain language features in order to shift the
reader's attention from what is said to how it is
said.
➢ “Foregrounding is essentially a technique for
‘making strange’ in language, or to extrapolate
from Shklovsky's Russian term ostranenie, a
method of defamiliarization in textual
composition. ... Whether the foregrounded
pattern deviates from a norm, or whether it
replicates a pattern through parallelism, the
point of foregrounding as a stylistic strategy is
that it should acquire salience in the act of
drawing attention to itself” (Simpson 2004).
PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM
Models of the Human Psyche
1. Dynamic Model
➢ Early in his career, Freud posited the dynamic
model, asserting that our minds are a
dichotomy consisting of the conscious (the
rational) and the unconscious (the irrational).
➢ The conscious, Freud argued, perceives and
records external reality and is the reasoning
part of the mind.
➢ Freud is the first to suggest that the
unconscious, not the conscious, governs a
large part of our actions.
➢ This irrational part of our psyche, the
unconscious, receives and stores our hidden
desires, ambitions, fears, passions, and
irrational thoughts.
➢ Freud believed that the unconscious houses
humanity’s two basic instincts: eros, or the
sexual instinct (later referred to by Freud as
libido), and the destructive or aggressive
instinct.
➢ For Freud, the unconscious is also the
storehouse of disguised truths and desires that
want to be revealed in and through the
conscious.
➢ These disguised truths and desires inevitably
make themselves known through dreams, art,
literature, play, and the so-called accidental
slips of the tongue or mistakes of speech or
actions known as parapraxes or Freudian
slips.
2. Economic Model
➢ The pleasure principle’s goal is immediate
relief from all pain or suffering.
➢ It craves only pleasures, and it desires
instantaneous satisfaction of instinctual drives,
ignoring moral and sexual boundaries
established by society.
➢ The reality principle is the part of the psyche
that recognizes the need for societal standards
and regulations on pleasure.
➢ Freud believed that both of these principles are
at war within the human psyche.
3. Topographic Model
➢ The most famous model of the human psyche,
however, is Freud's revised version of the
topographical model, the tripartite model.
➢ Sometimes referred to at the structural model,
this model divides the psyche into three parts:
the id, ego, and superego.
➢ ID: It is the irrational, instinctual, unknown, and
unconscious part of the psyche. It contains
 one’s secret desires, darkest wishes, and the
most intense fears. It wishes only to fulfill the
urges of the pleasure principle. It houses the
libido, the source of all psychosexual desires
and all psychic energy. Unchecked by any
controlling will, it operates on impulse, wanting
immediate satisfaction for all its instinctual
desires.
CARL JUNG
➢ The personal conscious or waking state is
that image or thought of which we are aware at
any given moment. Similar to a slide show,
every moment of our lives provides us with a
new slide.
➢ Although these vanished slides are forgotten
by the personal consciousness, they are stored
and remembered by the personal
unconscious.
➢ The collective unconscious, the part of the
psyche that is more impersonal and universal
than the personal conscious or the personal
unconscious. This part of the psyche houses
the cumulative knowledge, experiences, and
images of the entire human species.
MYTHOLOGICAL CRITICISM
➢ British author and scholar Gilbert Murray, for
example, was so struck by the similarities he
found between Orestes and Hamlet that he
concluded they were the result of memories we
carry deep within us, “the memory of the race,
stamped ... upon our physical organism.”
➢ That is why such criticism is sometimes called
a mythological, archetypal, totemic, or
ritualistic approach, with each name pointing
to the universality of literary patterns and
images that recur throughout diverse cultures
and periods.
➢ As a result, archetypal criticism often requires
knowledge and use of nonliterary fields, such
as anthropology and folklore, to provide
information and insights about cultural histories
and practice.
➢ This universal psychic aspect is an inherited
receptable of deep, powerful human themes
and commonalities. These memories exist in
the form of archetypes, which are patterns or
images of repeated human experiences—such
as birth, death, rebirth, the four seasons, and
motherhood, to name a few—that express
themselves in our stories, dreams, religions,
and fantasies.
➢ Occurring in literature in the form of recurrent
plot patterns, images, or character types, the
archetypes stir profound emotions that are
similar in all readers because they awaken
images stored in the collective unconscious
and produce feelings or emotions over which
readers initially have little control.
➢ There are many different archetypes, with
some more commonly met than others. Some
of the characters, images, and situations that
frequently elicit similar psychological
responses from diverse groups of people can
be found in the lists that follow:
NORTHROP FRYE
➢ All texts, he concluded, are part of “a central
unifying myth,” exemplified in four types of
literature, or four mythoi, that are analogous to
the seasons. Together, they compose the
entire body of literature, which he called the
monomyth.
➢ The mythos of summer, for example, is the
romance. It is analogous to the birth and
adventures of innocent youth. It is a happy
myth that indulges what we want to happen—
that is, the triumph of good over evil and
problems resolved in satisfying ways.
➢ Autumn, in contrast, is tragic. In the autumn
myth, the hero does not triumph but instead
meets death or defeat. Classic tragic figures,
like Antigone or Oedipus, are stripped of power
and set apart from their world to suffer alone.
➢ In the winter myth, what is normal and what is
hoped for are inverted. The depicted world is
hopeless, fearful, frustrated, even dead. There
is no hero to bring salvation, no happy endings
to innocent adventures.
➢ Spring, however, brings comedy: rebirth and
renewal, hope and success, freedom and
happiness. The forces that would defeat the
hero are thwarted, and the world regains its
order.
➢ According to Frye, every work of literature has
its place in this schema.

JACQUES LACAN
➢ Another difference from the Freudians was
Lacan’s notion that the unconscious, “the
nucleus of our being,” is orderly and
structured, not chaotic and jumbled and full of
repressed desires and wishes, as Freud
conceived of it.
➢ According to Lacan, our movement toward
adulthood occurs as several parts of our
personality develop in search of a unified and
psychologically complete self, which, though it
can never be achieved, can be approached by
stabilizing the sliding of signifiers.
➢ Consequently, we move through three stages,
or orders as Lacan calls them— the real, the
imaginary, and the symbolic, corresponding
to the experience of need, demand, and desire.
➢ As in Freud’s tripartite model, each of the
orders interacts with the others.
➢ From our birth until somewhere around 6
months, we function primarily in the imaginary
order—that is, in the part of the psyche that
contains our wishes, our fantasies, and most
importantly, our images.
➢ Somewhere between the age of 6 and 18
months, we enter what Lacan calls the looking-
glass or mirror stage. In this stage, we literally
see ourselves in a mirror while metaphorically
seeing ourselves in our mother’s image.
➢ During the mirror stage, we come to recognize
certain objects—what Lacan calls objet petit
a—as being separate images from ourselves.
These objects include eliminating bodily
wastes, our mother's voice and breasts, and
our own speech sounds.
➢ Once we learn that we are individual beings
who are separate from our mothers, we are
ready to enter Lacan's second developmental
phase, the symbolic order.
➢ Whereas the mother dominates the imaginary
order, the father dominates the symbolic order.
➢ In this phase, we learn language. Lacan would
argue that in actuality, language masters us
because he believes that language shapes our
identity as separate beings and molds our
psyches.
➢ Lacan contends that in the symbolic order, we
learn to differentiate between male and female.
This process of learning gender identity is
based on difference and loss.
➢ Whereas in the imaginary order, we delighted
in the presence of our mother, in the symbolic
order, we learn that our father comes to
represent cultural norms and laws. He stands
between us and our mother, and he enforces
cultural rules by threatening to castrate us if we
do not obey.
➢ Because the castration complex is obviously
different for boys and girls, the process of
completing the symbolic order successfully is
different for each sex. Lacan maintains that
entering the symbolic order is a form of
castration for both sexes.
➢ In Lacan’s view, castration is symbolic, not
literal, and represents each person's loss of
wholeness and his or her acceptance of
society’s rules.
➢ For the male, it means accepting the father,
the power symbol who possesses a phallus or
penis. Likewise, the female must not only
accept the father figure as dominant but also
accept her lack of a phallus.
DECONSTRUCTION
➢ Deconstructionists are critics who probe
beneath the finished surface of a story.
➢ Having been written by a human being with
unresolved conflicts and contradictory
emotions, a story may disguise rather than
reveal the underlying anxieties or perplexities
of the author.
➢ The story may have one meaning for the
ordinary unsophisticated reader and another
for the reader who responds to the subsurface
ironies.
BASIS OF DECONSTRUCTION
➢ All signs have differences (differance).
➢ Open up a space from that which they
represent
➢ They defer—open up a temporal chain, or ➢ Look for contradictions (does something not
participate in temporality; meaning are always make sense?).
delayed.
➢ Write about how the work shakes these things
➢ Every sign repeats the creation of time and up.
space.
POSTCOLONIALISM
➢ Difference is the ultimate phenomenon in the
universe—which enables and results from ➢ Postcolonial studies concentrate on writings
being. from colonized or formerly colonized cultures
and other places that were once dominated by,
➢ Difference is at the heart of existence, not but remained outside, the white, male,
essence. European cultural, political, and philosophical
tradition.
DECONSTRUCTIVE INTERPRETATION
➢ Early in its development, postcolonialism was
➢ Find binary opposition and implied center. referred to as “third world” or
“Commonwealth” literature.
➢ Refute claims.
➢ What postcolonialism and postcolonial
➢ Find contradictions, self-imposed logic that is theorists do is to investigate what happens
faulty. when two cultures clash and one of them
empowers and deems itself superior to the
➢ Focus on what the text is saying other than other.
what it appears to be saying.
➢ Postcolonial theory is a theory after (post)
➢ Look for gaps, margins, figures, echoes, colonialism.
digressions, and discontinuities.
➢ It is a theoretical approach that attempts to
BINARY OPPOSITIONS disrupt the dominant discourse of colonial
power.
▪ Nature / culture
▪ Health / disease ➢ It is about colonialism, emphasizing the effects
▪ Purity / contamination of colonialism on both the colonized and the
▪ Simplicity / complexity colonizer.
▪ Good / evil
▪ Speech / writing ➢ It provides a point of view that responds to
colonialism and the complicated power
ASSUMED CENTER dynamic that occurs both during the colonial
experience and in the aftermath.
“Nature is good.”
HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT
WHAT IS REALLY BEING SAID:
➢ Rooted in colonial power and prejudice,
➢Theme of lost innocence postcolonialism develops from a 4,000- year
➢Naïve romantic illusion history of strained cultural relations between
colonies in Africa and the Western world.
➢Western guilt over colonization
➢ By the middle of the 19th century, terms such
STEPS FOR DECONSTRUCTION
as colonial interests and the British empire
were both widely used in the media and in
➢ Upon first reading, write a brief summary of
government policies and international politics.
what MOST people would say about the work.
➢ Many British people believed that Great Britain
➢ Identify binaries in a chart.
was destined to rule the world.
➢ Identify metaphors (intended and unintended
➢ Many Westerners subscribed to the colonialist
meanings).
ideology that all races other than white were
inferior or subhuman.
➢ Look for any words that might have two
meanings.
➢ These subhumans or “savages” quickly
became the inferior and equally “evil” Others, a
philosophical concept called alterity whereby
“the Others” are excluded from positions of
power and viewed as both different and inferior.

➢ By the early 20th century, England’s political,

social, economic, and ideological domination of
its colonies began to disappear, a process
known as decolonization.

ASSUMPTIONS

➢ The effects of past colonialism are still evident

today, and a new form of colonialism is
currently effected by international corporations
operating in developing nations.

➢ The interaction of cultures creates blended

ones, mixtures of the native and colonial, a
process called hybridity or syncretism.

➢ “For me, hybridization is a discursive,

enunciatory, cultural, subjective process
having to do with the struggle around authority,
authorization, deauthorization, and the revision
of authority. It’s a social process. It’s not about
persons of diverse cultural tastes and fashions.”
–Bhabha

CATEGORIES OF POSTCOLONIALISM

A. Academically trained and are living in the

West

➢Fredric Jameson
➢Georg M. Gugelberger

B. Raised in non-Western cultures but now

resides in the West

➢Gayatri Spivak
➢Edward Said
➢Homi Bhabha

C. Subaltern writers living and writing in non-

Western cultures

➢Aijaz Ahmad