New Criticism

What does "common sense" say about this [literature]? That literature is about life, or is a reflection of life written from personal experience? That we study literature in order to "appreciate" something:

Subject-ivity?

Critical theory articulates what we bring to literature, which presumably determines what we get out of it. This is not a chaos of subjectivity. Instead, critical theory tries to examine what types of questions we should pose about literary works.

• an historical time period and what life was like then?

Literary Theory & Criticism

• What is literature?
• What are we supposed to do with it?
• How do we approach literature?

• or a particular author's ideas and feelings?

JUDICIAL CRITICISM

attempts to analyze and explain those effects through the basic forms of "dissection": subject, style, organization, techniques.

MIMETIC CRITICISM

seeks to evaluate literature as an imitation or representation of life.

PRAGMATIC CRITICISM

decides how well a work achieves its aims due to the author's strategies.

EXPRESSIVE CRITICISM

gushes about how well an author expressed or conveyed him or herself, his or her visions and feelings.

TEXTUAL CRITICISM

aims to establish an accurate uncorrupted original text identical with what the author intended. This may involve collating manuscripts and printed versions, deciding on the validity of rediscovered versions or chapters, deciphering damaged manuscripts and illegible handwriting, etc.

Schools of Literary Criticism

THEORETICAL CRITICISM

proposes a theory of literature and general principles as to how to approach it; criteria for evaluation emerge.

PRACTICAL / APPLIED CRITICISM

discusses particular works and authors; the theoretical principles are implicit within the analysis or interpretation.

IMPRESSIONISTIC CRITICISM

"appreciates" the responses evoked by works of literaturewith oohs and ahhs regarding "the soul" and declarations of "masterpieces."

Self-contained,

self-referential,

aesthetic object.

Formalism is a school of literary criticism and literary theory having mainly to do with structural purposes of a particular text. It is the study of a text without taking into account any outside influence.

A formalist movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasizes close reading to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object. The movement derived its name from John Crowe Ransom's 1941 book The New Criticism.

What does this mean?

New Criticism

What is it?

New Criticism emphasizes explication, or "close reading," of "the work itself." It rejects old historicism's attention to biographical and sociological matters. Instead, the objective determination as to "how a piece works" can be found through close focus and analysis, rather than through extraneous and erudite special knowledge.

The Intentional Fallacy

New Criticism, incorporating Formalism, examines the relationships between a text's ideas and its form, between what a text says and the way it says it.

New Criticism attempts to be a science of literature, with a technical vocabulary, some of which we all had to learn in grade school English classes (third-person, denoument, etc.). Working with patterns of sound, imagery, narrative structure, point of view, and other techniques discernible on close reading of the text, they seek to determine the function and appropriateness of these to the self-contained work.

New Critics, especially American ones in the 1940s and 1950s, attacked the standard notion of "expressive realism," the romantic fallacy that literature is the efflux of a noble soul, that for example love pours out onto the page in 14 iambic pentameter lines rhyming ABABCD etc. The goal then is not the pursuit of sincerity or authenticity, but subtlety, unity, and integrity--and these are properties of the text, not the author.

The work is not the author's; it was detached at birth. The author's intentions are "neither available nor desirable" (nor even to be taken at face value when supposedly found in direct statements by authors).