NEW CRITICISM
The term "New Criticism" defines the critical theory that has dominated Anglo-American literary criticism for the past fifty years. It was a highly influential school of Formalist criticism that flourished from the 40s to late 60’s.
New Criticism is an approach to literature that was developed by a group of American critics, most of whom taught at southern universities during the years following the first World War.
New Criticism appeared in response to Biographical Criticism that understood art as a reflection of the author’s life and in response to new forms of mass literature and literacy, a consumerist society and the role of commerce, mass media and advertising in people’s lives.
New critics look for patterns of sound, imagery, narrative structure, point of view and other patterns that can be found by doing a close reading of the work, concentrating on such formal aspects as rhythm, meter, theme, imagery, metaphor, etc.
. They stress that the meaning of a text should not be confused with the author’s intentions or its affects on the reader.
Language is used in such a way as to incorporate within the work the impersonal feelings and emotions common to all mankind. The art work is an impersonal formulation of common feelings and emotions. It is about the experiences of the author but these experiences are similar to all of our experiences.
Since the poem itself is an artefact or objective entity, its meaning must reside within its own structure.
All parts of the work are interrelated and interconnected, with each part reflecting and helping to
support the work's central idea. That allows for the harmonisation of conflicting ideas, feelings, and attitudes.
New Criticism
The New Criticism posits that every text is autonomous. History, biography, sociology, psychology, author's intention and reader's private experience are all irrelevant.
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. 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.
A text is spoken by a narrator or speaker who expresses an attitude which must be defined and who speaks in a tone which helps define the attitude: ironic, straight forward 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 New Critics usually 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 exercise in showing how all of its parts contribute to a complex but unified statement about human problems.
The reader should search out irony (ambiguous meaning) and paradox (contradictory meaning, hence also ambiguity). These will be the results of thematic oppositions, though they may also occur as oppositions in imagery: light versus dark, beautiful versus ugly, graceful versus clumsy. The oppositions may also be in the words chosen: concrete versus abstract, energetic versus placid.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
http://www.wsu.edu/~payne1/new2.html
http://www.geocities.com/Baja/9315/pe13.html
http://www.sou.edu/English/Hedges/Sodashop/RCenter/Theory/Explaind/ncritexp.htm
http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/Literary_Criticism/new_criticism/
http://www.sfu.ca/~mathieum/1960f.html
http://www.courses.sbc.edu/wcb/schools/SBC/engl/cmares/8/forums/forum1/messages/144.html
http://www.lawrence.edu/dept/english/courses/60A/newcrit.html
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~jlynch/Terms/Temp/newcrit.html