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NEW CRITICISM
The new criticism
is a movement with a series of theoretical and practical conceptions that
have their origin in 1915, this movement was the dominant trend in English
and American literary criticism of the mid twentieth century. (www.wikipedia.com;
notes of the subject English narrative)
This New Criticism used the methods 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. (http://130.179.92.25/Arnason_DE/New_Criticism.html)
New Criticism posits that every text is autonomous. History, biography,
sociology, psychology, author's intention and reader's private experience
are all irrelevant. ( http://130.179.92.25/Arnason_DE/New_Criticism.html)
New Criticism argues that each text has a central unity and the reader has
to discover this unity and interpret the text. A text is spoken by a
narrator or speaker who expresses an attitude which must be defined. A
work is good or bad depending on whether his themes are complex or not. (http://130.179.92.25/Arnason_DE/New_Criticism.html
Usually, the New Critics define their themes as oppositions: Life and
death, good and evil, love and hate. The analysis of a text is an exercise
in showing how all of its parts contribute to a complex but single (unified)
statement about human problems. (http://130.179.92.25/Arnason_DE/New_Criticism.html)
The method the reader must use is "close analysis." The reader must look
at the words, the syntax, the image and the structure. The reader should
search out irony (ambiguous meaning) and paradox (contradictory meaning,
hence also ambiguity) and he must discover tensions in the work. (http://130.179.92.25/Arnason_DE/New_Criticism.html)
New critical readings were in most cases brilliant and articulate but
sometimes they were idiosyncratic and moralistic. (www.wikipedia.com)
KEY TERMS
-Intentional fallacy: it is a term used by two important new critics(
Wimsatt and Beardsley) to describe what they considered the error of
assuming a text means what its author intended to mean. (http://english.upenn.edu/jlynch/terms/temp/intentional.html)
-Affective fallacy: It is a term used by two important new critics (Wimsatt
and Beardsley), to describe what they considered the error of assuming a
text’s meaning can be described in terms of its effect on the reader.
(http://www.english.upenn.edu/jlynch/terms/temp/international.html)
-Ambiguity: A text can have multiple simultaneous meanings. (www.wikipedia.com)
-Close reading: The most important skill in any form of literary study. It
pays close attention to what is printed on the page and it is a much more
subtle and complex process that the term might suggest.
(http://www.mantex.co.uk/samples/closeread.htm)
-Hersey of paraphrase: Assuming that an interpretation of a literary work
could consist of a detailed summary of paraphrase. (http://www.kristisiegel.com/theory.htm)
AUTHORS OF THE NEW CRITICISM
-T. S. Elliot -Robert Penn Warren -L. A .Richards
-F. R. Leavis -John Crow Ranson -Yvor Winters
-William Empson -Cleanth Brooks -David Robey
(www.wikipedia.com; notes of the subject English narrative; http://www.kristisiegel.com/theory.html)
PERSONAL RESPONSE
In my opinion new criticism was a movement that benefited a lot English
literature because I think that it is a big advance and a good idea to pay
attention only to the text themselves and to the biographical information
of the author and they contributed to English literature with close
reading that in my opinion it is a very important skill.
SOURCES
MLA:
-New Criticism, David Arnason, 30-jun-2006
http://130.179.92.25/Arnason_DE/New_Criticism.html
-New Criticism, Wikimedia foundation Inc, 30-jun-2006
www.wikipedia.com
-New Criticism, Dr. Kristi Siegel, 30-jun-2003
http://www.kristisiegel.com/theory.htm#newcriticism |