NEW CRITICISM
Presentation by,
RITHIKA. K
IIIrd BA ENGLISH
INTRODUCTION
- New Criticism was a formalist movement in literary theory
- The term New Criticism was first coined in the twentieth century by American critic and poet John Crow Ransom, founder of the Kenyon Review who wrote a book titled 'The New Criticism' (1941)
- The most simplistic definitions of New Criticism identify it as a critical movement that propagates the idea of "art for art's sake"
- The term put into use by JOEL. E SPINGARN
- I. A. Richards - Practical Criticism (1929)
- William Empson - Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930)
- Cleanth Brooks - The Well-Wrought (1947)
Works that has the essence of new criticism
- John Crowe Ransom
- Allen Tate
- R.P. Blackmur
- Kenneth Burke
- Yvor Winters
- Cleanth Brooks
- Robert Penn Warren
- William Wimsatt
The American New Critics
- Willam Empson
- I.A. Richards
THE SCRUTINY CRITICS
- Leavis
- L.C.Knights
- Derek Traverse
The English new critics
- New Criticism denounces historical and biographical methods of literary criticism
- Intentional fallacy and Affective fallacy are considered impediments to objective criticism.
- The New Critics view the literary work to be an autonomous verbal object.
- New Criticism is of the view that the nature of literary language is different from the scientific or the common language
- Interpretations based on the context anf language
THE CHARACTERISTIC FEATURES OF NEW CRITICISM
THE CHICAGO CRITICS AND FORMALISM
- A group of formalist American literary critics
- Influenced American criticism during the latter half of the twentieth century
The prominent critics
- Richard McKeon
- R.S.Crane
- Elder Olson
- Bernard Weinberg
- Norman Mclean.
- They are called “Aristotelian” or “Neo- Aristotelian”
- Critics and criticism: Ancient and Modern(1952)
- The study of criticism and the structure of poetry(1953)
- Formalism, also known as Russian Formalism
- Innovative literary school of criticism that developed in twentieth century Russia
- The formalists prefered greater objectivity and scientific critical approch
- Focuses on features of literary text
- American new criticism refered as Formalism
Formalism
- Osip Brik
- Boris Eikhenbaum
- Yury Tyananov
- Boris Tomashevsky
PIONEERS
There are five major concepts is new criticism they are:
CONCEPTS IN NEW CRITICISM
- OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVE
- INTENTIONAL FALLACY
- AFFECTIVE FALLACY
- CLOSE READING
- ORGANIC UNITY
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an objective correlative;
in other words, a set of objects,situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked
- An objective correlative is a literary term first set forth by T.S. Eliot in the essay 'Hamlet and His Problems' and published in The Sacred Wood (1920)
- Eliot used the term exclusively to refer to his claimed artistic mechanism
- Express the characters emotion rather describing as picture
Objective Correlative
- Hamlets strong emotions were not supported by objective corelative
- Hamlet as "artistic failure"
HAMLET AND HIS PROBLEMS
- Intentional Fallacy is a term used in 20th-century literary criticism
- Describe the problem inherent in trying to judge a work of art by assuming the purpose of the artist who created it
- Introduced by W.K. WIMSATT and MONROE. C. BEARDLEY
- IDEA: The meaning of a work does not originate with author's intention
Intentional Fallacy
- E.D. Hirsch's, Validity in Interpretation (1967)
- Roland Barthes' essay 'The Death of the Author' (1968)
- Michel Foucault's essay 'What Is An Author?' (1969)
Some works that contains 'INTENTIONAL FALLACY'
Affective fallacy is a term from literary criticism used to refer to the supposed error of judging or evaluating a text on the basis of its emotional effects on a reader. The term was coined by W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley
Affective Fallacy
- Describes the careful, sustained interpretation of a brief passage of text
- The technique as practiced today was pioneered by I. A. Richards
- Close reading is sometimes called explication de texte
Close Reading
- Organic Unity is the idea that a thing is made up of interdependent parts
- Organic unity is a concept founded by the philosopher, Plato
- The concept of organic unity gained popularity through the New Critics movement. Cleanth Brooks played an integral role in modernizing the organic unity principle
Organic Unity
Few exponents of new criticism:
PIONEERS OF NEW CRITICISM
- I.A. Richards
- Cleanth Brooks
- William Kurtz Wimsatt
- Robert Penn Warren
- Structuralism opposes the focus of New Criticism on individual works and isolation
- Deconstruction rejects the assumptions of New Criticism
- The New Critics had underemphasized the roles of the reader and the poet by overemphasizing the object
CONCLUSION