EDUARDO ESPAÑA PALOP

 

In these pages we are going to talk about the New Criticism; the main reason to choose this movement is that in my opinion it is the first modern critical movement. Before this movement, the criticism was not a “scientific” discipline, and this movement, which appeared in the last century, started a new age in the literary criticism, which reached the status of a serious and objective discipline. Nowadays it is an obsolete theory, but I think that most of its characteristics are still valid in the different new theories.

This movement appeared in the late 1920s and 1930s and was fundamental to understand the Anglo-American criticism during the twentieth century. It appeared as a reaction against the literary theories that existed at this moment. The most important literary theories of this moment were: Romanticism, impressionism and New Humanism. These theories analyzed the text according to external factors: the Romanticism saw the art only as an author’s self-expression (if you make equal the meaning of the poem with the author’s intention, you are doing an Intentional Fallacy); the Impressionism based the art in the subjectivity of the reader (if you make equal the reader’s feelings with the meaning of the text, you are doing an Affective Fallacy); and the New Humanism applied criteria based on morality and value to literature. (http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/glossary/New_Criticism.html).

The origin of this movement is also related with the appearance of new forms of mass literature in the twentieth century, like mass media and advertisings. The critics wanted to emphasize the characteristics that differentiate the real literature from this new type of pseudo-literatures. They make a difference between high art and mass art. (New criticism explained)

            The main proposal of the New Criticism is that a literary work has to be regarded as autonomous, the only characteristics that we can analyze to study a literary work are the words which appear in the text, these words have an internal organization which is the base of the text and the main work of the critics is to discover it: “ A poem consists less of a series of referential and verifiable statements about the 'real' world beyond it, than of the presentation and sophisticated organization of a set of complex experiences in a verbal form”. The New Critics based their analysis of the texts only on

 

 

textual elements, like structure, repetition or rhythms; and textual devices like irony and oppositions. (Introduction to Modern Literary Theory.).

The authors who established the foundations of this movement in the 1920s and 1930s were I. A. Richards (Practical Criticism [1929]), William Empson (Seven Types of Ambiguity [1930]), and T. S. Eliot ("The Function of Criticism" [1933]). The approach was significantly developed later, however, by a group of American poets and critics, including R. P. Blackmur, Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and William K. Wimsatt. (Virtualit: Critical approaches)

This movement has received critics from many people. The main critics are based on its formalism, the New Critics are not interested in the human content of literature and they ignore the historical context of literature. The New Critics want to transform the literature in an abstract science, and for many other critics it is an impossible task. The concept of “close reading”[1]  is also very criticized because, for many critics, it is only a pedagogical device. (The Old New Criticism and its Critics)

In my opinion this movement has had a very function in the history of the literature because it gives to the text an important function,  the problem is that in a text, the most important element is the text, but we can not think that a text is independent, the words are not only part of a close system, they also represent the real world. During this year, in this subject, we have analyzed many poems, and in some of them we have only analyzed the text; however, in many others we have analyzed the poems in its relation with the life of the author, or in relation with the historical context. And we have seen that these types of relations are very important to understand the meaning of the poem. We have seen, for example, in the last paper, the relationship between Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes through their poems. We can analyze these poems without the parameter of the love between them, but in my opinion we can not cover all the meanings of the poem without knowing that these poems are written in a special context.

 

 

 

Bibliography:

∙ Virtualit: Critical approaches

  webstaff@bedfordstmartins.com ed. Visited 23 May 2006

  http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/virtualit/poetry/critical_define/crit_newcrit.html 

 

· The Old New Criticism and its Critics

Richard John Neuhaus ed. Visited 23 May 2006

http://firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9308/young.html

 

· Introduction to Modern Literary theory.

  Kristi Siegel ed. Visited 23 May 2006

  http:// kristisiegel.com/theory.htm      

 

· www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/glossary/New_Criticism.html

 Ian Lancashire ed. Visited 23 May 2006

 www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/glossary/New_Criticism.html

 

· New Criticism explained

 Warren Hedges ed. Visited 23 May 2006

 www.sou.edu/Hedges/Sodashop/Rcenter/Theory/Explained/ncritexp.htm

 

· www.130.179.92.25/Arnason_DE/New_Criticism.html

 David Arnson ed. Visited 23 May 2006

 http://130.179.92.25/Arnason_DE/New_Criticism.html

 

 

 

 

           

 

           

           

 

 

           


[1] Close reading: a close and detailed analysis of the text itself to arrive at an interpretation without referring to historical, authorial, or cultural concerns. (Introduction to Modern Literary Theory.)