An Introduction to New Criticism

An Introduction to New Criticism

Professor Henning, ENC 1102 Honors

What to Look For...

What Does Close Reading Entail?

The Guiding Principle:

Keep in mind these questions:

The text speaks for itself.

• What ingredients of language make this text good?

Well, first of all, it is founded on this idea: that anyone can do it!

• Are there paradoxes? Tensions between different ideas?

• MOST IMPORTANTLY...Why??

From Shmoop:

The author's very private personal journal

Some Key Concepts

TEXT

"What's that, you say? You have the author's very private personal journal? The New Critics don't care. It's the text that matters. They're not interested in reading every writer's innermost personal musings--that kind of nazel gazing is best reserved for yo' momma."

Any kind of writing. Many theorists, including New Critics, like the word "text" instead of "work" because it de-emphasizes the author, their biography, and authorial intentions.

Democraticization of Education

AMBIGUITY

A lack of clarity or definite answers. Ambiguity makes writing more complex, interesting, and even true to life.

But there's really no 'just' involved in New Critics' readings. That's not giving them enough credit.

New Criticism came about during a time in which more people than ever were attending college, especially post-WWII.

Brooks' "The Formalist Critics" (1951)

"The Formalist Critics" (1951) cont'd

More Key Concepts

Cleanth Brooks, one of the key figures of the New Criticism movement, laid out the following assumptions:

• That in a successful work, form and content cannot be separated.

--from Shmoop

Before, there was an emphasis on the master scholar, who would bestow upon their students all they needed to know about a literary work. New Criticism collapsed this sense of authority, however, with the idea of close reading.

• That form is meaning.

• That literary criticism is a description and evaluation of its object.

PARADOX

IRONY

• That literature is ultimately metaphorical and symbolic.

• That the primary concern of criticism is with the problem of unity--the kind of whole that the literary work forms or fails to form and the relation of the various parts to each other in building up this whole...

• That the general and the universal are not seized upon by abstraction but got at through the concrete and the particular.

A statement that contradicts itself but still feels true somehow. Paradoxes in literature are less about logical conundrums and more about illuminating meaning.

John Crowe Ransom, author of The New Criticism (1941) and founder of the movement

Literary modernists like T. S. Eliot greatly influenced the tenets of New Criticism.

When the actual meaning is different than the literal meaning. Verbal irony is the tension between what is said and what is meant; situational irony plays with the differences between expectations and reality; and dramatic irony is when the audience knows something the characters do not.

Let's All Be New Critics & Get to Close Reading!

Shmoop continues, "[The New Critics] close read every word in order to gain insight into the work's form, literary devices, technique, and so on."

Before, During, After

BEFORE

DURING

AFTER

The issue of The New Yorker in which John Cheever's "Reunion" first appeared.

Practicing this school of literary theory, then, simply demands sustained attention to the text itself--both what's in it, and what's not in it.

New Criticism, emergent during the 1920s-30s, becomes the dominant form of literary theory until the 1960s.

New Criticism falls out of favor and is replaced by more socially conscious forms of theory, as well as Post-structuralism, in the 1960s-70s.

Biographical Criticism, treating the work in the context of an author's life--this goes back to the classical period.

Nevertheless, the New Critical insistence on close reading remains fundamental for all literary studies.