Introduction to Literary Criticism (I)

From Theory to Practice

Twentieth-Century Literary Theory and Criticism

Throughout the twentieth century, modern literary theory has developed into a distinct branch of literary studies aimed at explaining the assumptions and values upon which various forms of literary criticism rest. Modern literary theory provides the criteria which critics apply in their practical interpretations of texts.

Literature as Communication
context addresser message addressee contact code e.g. Marxist theories, poste.g. New Criticism, colonial theories, etc. Russian Formalism context e.g. readerwriter text reader response theories e.g. classical language biography,
psychoanalytic criticism, etc. e.g. Structuralism

1. New Criticism

A school of literary criticism which emerged in the 1920s and developed in the Anglo-American cultural frame (especially the United States), dominating literary studies in the 1940s and the 1950s. It emerged in reaction to the biographical and historical criticism of the time (based on concern with the lives and psychology of authors, social background and literary history). Its representatives promote intrinsic criticism and invite the reader/critic to look only at the words on the page.

Representatives of New Criticism

The new English at Cambridge: I. A. Richards (Principles of Literary Criticism, 1924; Science and Poetry, 1926; Practical Criticism, 1929); William Empson American New Criticism: John Crowe Ransom (Criticism, Inc., 1937, The New Criticism, 1941) and his students Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks the members of an informal group of literary discussion; W. K. Wimsatt. The New Critics felt it was time to do away with the traditional approaches, which laid emphasis only on the historical, social, biographical or psychological contexts, on the moral or philosophical implications, or still on the textual-linguistic specific factors. They showed, above all, concern with the text itself, the words on the page, nothing more or less.

Early Promoters: T. S. Eliot

American-born English poet, playwright, and literary critic:

Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919): Writers must have the historical sense that is, a sense of the tradition of writing in which they must situate themselves. This process reinforces the necessary depersonalization of the artist if his/her art is to attain the impersonality it must have if it is to approach the condition of science. 1. the canon: the elevation of some literary works over others by way of close and disinterested textual analysis. Only some literary works could be considered Literature (the best that has been thought and written) and could become part of the tradition/canon, holding an essence of human experience in their constituent medium. The canon is exclusive and hierarchical, and, though it claims to be natural, given, it is artificially constructed by critical discrimination, taste, preference, partiality, etc.

Early Promoters: T. S. Eliot

2. privileging poetry as the dominant genre ( poetry the main focus of much New Criticism) 3. the emphasis on science, objectivity, impersonality, and the medium as the focal object of analysis. the impersonal theory of poetry: Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. The poet = a kind of impersonal catalyst of experience, a medium not of his/her consciousness or personality but of that which in the end makes up the medium itself the poem and our sole object of interest. (Eliot qtd. in Selden, Widdowsen, Booker, 2005: 16) the New Critics concept of fallacy: the traditional critics erroneous emphasis on what is creation and interpretation and not on the text as such.

British Representatives: I. A. Richards

He attempted to lay down an explicit theoretical base for (precise, science-like) literary study and to establish basic tenets for the close reading of poetry.

the special character of literary language: the distinction between the referential language (of non-literary discourse) and the emotive language (of poetry), between statements (conveyed by science), and pseudo-statements (conveyed by poetry, which impresses not through the truth it contains, but through its structural coherence); the emphasis on metaphor as a constitutive element of language, and on the determining role of irony and tension in poetry high poetry is characterized by a balanced poise - an equilibrium of opposite factors always in a state of tension; irony, for instance, brings them into the poem as contending, complementary impulses.

British Representatives: William Empson

Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930):

emphasis

on ambiguity as the defining characteristic of poetic language; demonstrations of close, creative practical criticism in action; the tendency to detach literary texts from their contexts in the process of reading their ambiguities.

American Representatives: W. K. Wimsatt

The essays The Intentional Fallacy (1946) and The Affective Fallacy (1949): laying stress on the addresser (writer) message (text) addressee (reader) nexus in the pursuit of an objective criticism that abjures both the personal input of the writer (intention) and the emotional effect on the reader (affect) in order purely to study the words on the page and how the artefact works.

the intentional fallacy: It refers to the critics mistake of taking into account for their interpretation the genesis of the work, such as the authors biography, psychology and particularly his intentions. the affective fallacy: Criticism should be objective, should cite the nature of the object rather than its effects upon the subject. Such criteria for judging the worth of a literary work as the readers impulse to read it twice, the psychological effects it has upon them, are inappropriate for a well-founded critical undertaking.

American Representatives: J. C. Ransom and Cleanth Books

J. C. Ransom:

Criticism should become more scientific, or precise and systematic and the critic should be able to exhibit not the prose core to which a poem may be reduced, but the differentia, residue, or tissue, which keeps the object poetical or entire.

C. Brooks: Understanding Poetry (1938); Understanding Fiction (1943); The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947):

The heresy of paraphrase opposes the notion of content or subject matter to that of structure, on which the value of a literary work actually depends. It is heretical to summarize the content of a text, and thus to overlook its form, because in this way one plays off literary works against scientific ones.

New Criticism. Basic Concerns and Study Method

What is the literary work as an art form? What is the relationship between its structural components and its meaning (if it has any)? Can one speak about the content as distinct from the form of the poem? What is the best method to probe the essence of the literary text?
CLOSE READING: Attention must be paid to what the text says and how it does it (because form and content are inseparable.) A poem contains everything that is needed for its interpretation. Every word in the text is significant, not only through its denotative, but also through its connotative force. As a verbal icon, a poem is characterized by an all-at-onceness of meaning, in which every phonetic, syntactic, lexical and rhetorical element becomes significant. (New Criticism is not concerned with context historical, biographical, intellectual, etc. or with the fallacies of intention/affect.)

New Criticism. Main Concepts and Procedures

A literary work is a timeless, autonomous (self-sufficient) verbal object, which remains the same though readers and readings may change. Literature is a special kind of language, whose attributes are defined by systematic opposition to practical language. (Practical language depends on denotation, while literary language depends on connotation, i.e., implication, association, suggestion, evocation of meanings and shades of meaning. Moreover, literary language is expressive, communicating tone, attitude and feeling.) Literary language implies a special arrangement of words which generates a complex, organic unity; how a literary text means is inseparable from what it means.

New Criticism. Main Concepts and Procedures

Through its organic unity, the text provides complexity and order. New Criticism is concerned to trace how the parts of the text relate, how it achieves its order and harmony, how it contains and resolves:

irony (taking different forms from verbal sarcasm, innuendo, mock-politeness, etc. - to situational irony a texts inclusion of varying perspectives on the same characters or events); paradox (a type of semantic oddity, a statement which seems absurd because self-evidently false, but which represents the actual way things are); tension (the linking together of opposites: in its simplest form, it implies the integration of the abstract and the concrete, of general ideas embodied in specific images; in its broader form, it presupposes the dynamic interplay among the texts opposing tendencies, i.e. its paradoxes, ironies, ambiguities). ambivalence and ambiguity (a word/image/event generates two or more different meanings);

New Criticism. Main Concepts and Procedures

Emphasis on decoding the figurative language of the text, i.e., its images, symbols and metaphors. The sense of order in the text is given by the harmonisation or subordination of all its multiple and conflicting meanings, produced by paradoxes, ironies, ambiguities and tensions, to the theme of the work. The theme = the complete meaning of the text, serving as a commentary on human experience/values/nature/condition.