Patricia Valle Elegido

ANGLO-AMERICAN FORMALISM

(NEW CRITICISM)

INTRODUCTION

The Critical Approaches are all those methods of study and analysis with which we can interpret, characterize and value the object of study (a poem in this case). Throughout the Critical Approaches we can see what the work is talking about, and we can perceive its structure, its genre, etc. But to do all this, each Critical Approach uses a series of different critical devices, such as technical concepts, objectives, and especially, each one of the Critical Approaches has its own behaviour in the study of a work. (Notes)

CONTEXT AND ANTECEDENTS OF NEW CRITICISM

In the decade of the twenties, and in part of the thirties, the American criticism was dominated by tendencies of the 19^th century such as the Impressionism, the Naturalist Realism, and the Marxism. (Asensi, 141)

“New Criticism occurred in response to: Biographical Criticism that understood art primarily as a reflection of the author’s life; competition for dollars and students from sciences in academia; and new forms of mass literature and literacy, an increasingly consumerist society and the increasingly visible role of commerce, mass media, and advertising in people’s lives.” (New Criticism Explained)

The critical work and the theoretical ideas of the new critics come from four sources:

The romantic English poetic represented by Coleridge and Shelley.

The North American literary thought displayed by Emerson, Thoreau and Poe.

The ideology and concepts about T.E. Hulme’s literature.

And the tradition represented by F.R. Leavis, especially the one represented by T.S. Eliot and I.A. Richard. (Asensi)

“THE TEXT AND THE TEXT ALONE” APPROACH

In the 1930s, there were a certain number of tendencies, such as the Marxism, the Psychoanalytic Criticism, the Myth Criticism, the Linguistic Criticism and the Neo-aristotelics of Chicago. Nevertheless, it is clear that the New Criticism was dominant at the universities, chairs and North American schools of those years. (Asensi, 139)

There is a correspondence between the Russian Formalism and the New Criticism because both trends have the tendency to focus the critical attention in the literary work itself. (Asensi, 133) But for this group of critics, it is fundamental the understanding of the literary work as an artistic object, independent from factors such as the author, the reader, the historical context, etc.

New Criticism argues that every text has a central unity, and reader must discover this unity. The reader interprets the text with the only help of the text itself. (New_Criticism) The method used to interpret a text is the “close reading”, which means to concentrate and pay all our attention to the literary work to understand its meaning and to discover that unity mentioned before. Therefore, the new critics understand the literary work as an organic unity in which all the parts contribute to the global meaning.

The method of “close reading” implies to criticise all those approaches which explain and understand the text taking into account factors that are outside it. This criticism has four objectives: Intentional Fallacy (which affects the author), Affective Fallacy (which affects the reader), Fallacy of Communication (which affects the content of the literary text), and Mimetic Fallacy (which affects the reality). (Asensi, 154) It doesn’t mean that the other factors (history, biography, psychology, reader response) were not taken into account. They can help us to a certain extent, but they are not essential elements. “The best way to arrive to history and the world is only throughout the text.” (Asensi, 153)

AUTHORS

The main authors who made up the New Criticism and their best known works are: T.S. Eliot “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1917), “Hamlet and his Problems” (1919); John Crowe Ranson “The World’s Body” (1934), “Criticism, Inc.” (1937), “The New Criticism” (1941); I.A. Richards “Principles of Literary Criticism” (1924) , “Science and Poetry” (1926), “Practical Criticism” (1929); Yvor Winters: “Primitivism and Decadence” (1937), “Forms of Discovery” (1967); William Empson “Seven Types of Ambiguity” (1930), “Some Versions of Pastoral” (1932); Allen Tate “The Types of Poetry” (1934), “The Angelic Imagination” (1951), “The Simbolic Imagination” (1951); Cleanth Brooks “Modern Poetry and the Tradition” (1939), “The Well-Wrought Urn” (1947), “Literary Criticism: A Short History” (1957) (with William K. Wimsat); Robert P. Warren “Selected Essays” (1958); R.P. Blackmur: “Notes on the Language of E.E. Cummings” (1930), “The Lion and the Honeycomb: Essays in Solicitude and Critique” (1955); William K. Wimsatt: “The Intentional Fallacy” (1946- with Monroe C. Beradsley), “The Affective Fallacy” (1949- with Monroe C. Beradsley), and “The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry” (1954); Kenneth Burke (sometimes excluded due to the plurality of his ideological positions): “The Philosophy of Literary Form” (1941), “A Rhetoric of Motives” (1950) (Asensi)

Other new critics who are important to mention are: Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Cummings, Frost, Emily Dickinson, Dos Passos, Dylan Thomas, Steinbeck, Auden, and Faulkner. (Asensi)

MAGAZINES: The Southern Review (Robert P. Warren and Cleanth Brooks), The Kenyon Review, Accent, and Hika. (Asensi)

The majority of the New Criticism’s studies cover a wide temporal framework, because the main works and magazines of this American movement appeared between 1930 and at the end of the sixties. (Asensi, 138)

EXAMPLE

If we would like to analyse, for example, the first stanza of Tennyson’s poem “The Lady of Shalott” throughout the “close reading”, it would be more or less like this:

On either side the river lie

Long fields of barley an of rye,

That clothe the wold and meet the sky;

And thro’ the field the road runs by

To many-tower’d Camelot;

Gazing where the lilies blow,

Round an island there below,

The island of Shalott.

In this stanza, the author is setting the poem in a place and describing people. Camelot is different from other places because it is a city with heroes and a wizard. The particular island of Shalott is surrounded by lilies, the flower which symbolizes death and innocence, two characteristics of the Lady that we would see later in the rest of the poem. (Close Reading Example)

CONCLUSION

If we would try to interpret “The Lady of Shalott” just reading the poem, we could see that Tennyson is telling a story about a Lady in a tower of Camelot, etc., but what we could not realise, if we do not take into account his life and psychology, is that Tennyson is really talking here about the loneliness sometimes suffered by artists.

This kind of literary approach is quite useful because throughout factors such as rhythm, metaphors, tone, syntax, images (structure in general), and especially throughout words we can be capable enough to interpret the whole poem or any literary work. But, in my opinion, although the poem itself can “say” a lot of things in itself, it is necessary to take into account the biography of the author, the historical context when the poem was written, the psychology of the author, etc. to understand the entire meaning of the poem.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Asensi Pérez, Manuel, Historia de la teoría de la literatura [el siglo XX hasta los años setenta], Valencia, 2003, Ed. Tirant Lo Blanch

- Chapter 3: “La teoría literaria en los EEUU durante el periodo 1900-1950

Introduction to Modern Literary Theory

http://www.kristisiegel.com/theory.htm#newcriticism, visited May 20, 2006

New Criticism Explained

http://www.sou.edu/English/Hedges/Sodashop/RCenter/Theory/Explaind/ncritexp.htm, visited May 20, 2006

SOU English Dept.

1997

The New_Criticism

http://130.179.92.25/Arnason_DE/New_Criticism.html, visited May 20, 2006

University of Manitoba