Student’s name: Aída Blat Palacios.

Title of the paper:New Criticism: Brightness on the Shadowed Methods of Literary
                                      Analysis.

Topic: New Criticism.

Abstract:

    Literature has been traditionally studied as the world of the unconsciousness; the historical background of an author or the hidden interpretations of an image are common aims in a literature criticism where the important seem to be not the work  by itself but all the aspects round it.

    During my scholarship, different teachers tried to convince me about the idea of the importance of the interpretative aptitudes a good critic must have, but this is the point where the growth student tries to demonstrate that it is the work by itself who can show the reader all its deeper content.

    New Criticism bets on a critical method where not the author’s relationship with his/her work (‘the intentional fallacy’) nor the reader’s individual response (‘the affective fallacy’)  is so important as the understanding of the text as a unit, the central aim of any critical analysis.

    My research pretends to be an easy way to acknowledge New Criticism differences towards previous critical tendencies, who are who in New Criticism, why it appeared in the second half of the 20th century, and all the technical aspects this tendency implies when analysing literary texts.

Autoevaluation: A+ with Distinction / Matrícula de Honor.
 
 

Academic year 1998 / 1999.
12 Marzo 1999
a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Aída Blat Palacios.
Universitat de València Press
 

Page mantained by
© Copyright 1995-1999 John Slatin y Vicente Forés.
 Created: 5/1/96 Updated 03/02/99
 
 

The term New Criticism defines the criticaltheory that has dominated Anglo-American literary criticism for the past fifty years. Its method of close reading and emphasis on the text provided a corrective to fuzzy biographical criticism and subjective enthusiasm, but for many teachers in North America and Britain, it became not a method of criticism, but criticism itself. Alternatives to its interpretive strategies have until recently been regarded with deep suspicion. It is important to understan the precepts of the New Criticism as critical positions and not as the truth about literature before looking at other strategies.
The New Criticism posits that every text is autonomous. History, biography, sociology, psychology, author's relatioship to a work is called "the intentional fallacy". Any attempt to look at the reader's individual response is called "the affective fallacy".
New Criticism argues that each text has a central unity. The responsibility of the reader is to discover this unity. The reader's job is to interpret the text, telling in what ways each of its parts contributes to the central unity. The primary interest is in themes. A text is sapoken by a persona (narrator or speaker) who expresses an attitude which must be defined and who speaks in a tone which helps define the attitude: ironic, straightforward, or ambiguous. Judgements of the value of a text must be based on the richness of the attitude and the complexity and the balance of the text. The key phrases are ambivalence, ambiguity, tension, irony and paradox.
The reader's analysis of these elements lead him to an examination of the themes. A work is good or bad depending on whether the themes are complex and whether or not they contribute to the central, unifying theme. The more complex the themes are and the more closely they contribute to a central theme (unity) the better the work.
Usually, New Critics define their themes as oppositions: Life and death, good and evil, love and hate, harmony and strife, order and disorder, eternity and time, reality and appearance, truth and falsehood, emotion and reason, simplicity and complexity, nature and art. The analysis of a text is an exarcise in showing how all of its parts contribute to a complex but single (unified) statement about human problems.
The method the reader must use is "close analysis". The reader must look at the words, the syntax, the images, the structure (usually the argument). The words must be understood to be ambiguous. The more possible meanings a word has, the richer the ambiguity. The reader should seach out irony -ambiguous meaning- and paradox -contradictory meaning, hence also as ambiguity. The reader must discover tensions in the work. These will be the results of thematic oppositions, though they may also occur as oppositions in imagery: light vs.dark, beautiful vs. ugly, graceful vs. clumsy. The oppositions may also be in the words chosen: concrete vs. abstract, energetic vs. placid.
The reader must guard against two evils, stock responses (autumn should not make the reader sad unless the poem directs sadness at the thought of autumn) and idiosyncratic (affective) responses.

Key texts
Brooks and Warren    Understanding Poetry
William Epson     Seven Types of Ambiguity
I.A.Richards    Practical Criticism
Cleanth Brooks    The Well Wrought Urn