New Criticism, An easy handout for beginners

New Criticism

A school of literary criticism that emerged in America and later extended to England from the 1920s onwards. The term ‘New Criticism’ was first used in 1910 by Joel .E. Spingarn, an American literary critic in an address at Columbia University. The inception of this literary critical movement is attributed to the modernist writers such as T.S Eliot, I. A Richards and F.R Leavis. It is an intrinsic and objective method of analyzing a literary text. And applied to the new stream in critical thought after the American scholar John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974), it was here the foundation of New Criticism was laid with the publication of the book entitled ‘The New Criticism’ (1941).

The merits of the work lies neither in the minds of the writer nor in the responses of the reader, but in the language and the structure of the work itself. The text is more important than the reader and the writer. The New Critics was of the view that the meaning of a text is inseparable from its structure. Thus, they strongly advocated ‘Close Reading’ of the text, every word in a text must be counted. A work should be examined as a linguistic formation in which all the parts are held together by Irony, Paradox, Ambiguity and Tension.

They refused the historical, biographical and comparative approaches, as they felt that these methods erroneously look at the extra textual elements. They underline the fact that an author’s intended meaning is irrelevant to the proper literary analysis; instead, the focus should remain on the text itself. A work can’t be judged or evaluated on the basis of the reader's response to it.

New Criticism shared many common features with Russian formalism. As a school of criticism both focused exclusively on exploring specifically the literary aspect of the text. And also, unkindly rejected the subjective and biographical interpretations of reading. Both emphasized the text should be regarded as an autonomous entity, by stressing the fact that a literary text has self-sufficient verbal existence. Moreover, both regarded poetry as a special mode of language and argued literary language is connotative. They differed only in their approach. The formalists thought that form was more important than the content. However the New Critics form and content were integrated into each other. As a result of their contradicting principle the Formalists tended to focus on genres and general literary devices, while the New Critics preferred to examine the individual texts.

Some famous figures who belonged to this group of criticism were T.S Eliot, F.R Leavis, I.A Richards, Allen Tate, R.P Blackmur, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, W. K Wimsatt, Monroe Beardsley, Rene Wallek, William Empson and Yvor Winders. New Criticism had a very significant impact upon critical attitudes and played an important role in doing the studies of literature. New Critics emphasized the complex interplay within the text. For them a text is made up of Irony, Paradox, Ambiguity and Tension. So, their primary concern lies on the organic unity of structure and verbal meaning.

The terms Irony and paradox are associated to Cleanth Brooks. He is well known for his work, "The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the structure of poetry"(1947). The title contains an allusion to the fourth stanza of John Donne's poem 'The Canonization'. He illustrates the terms Irony and Paradox in his celebrated essays “Irony as a principle of structure” and “The language of paradox” respectively. Irony is a literary device in which words are used in such a way that their intended meaning is different from the actual meaning of the words.

Brutus is an honorable man (Julius Caesar)

Water water everywhereNor any drop to drink (The Rime of The Ancient Mariner)

While Paradox refers to self contradictory statements or anomalous juxtaposition of incongruous ideas, which simply means seemingly opposite words or concepts are put together in order to reveal the hidden or unexpected truths.

· War is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength (1984 by George Orwell)

· A wise fool.

The term Ambiguity is associated to William Empson. "Seven Types of Ambiguity" Which was the most influential critical work of twentieth century and was a key foundation work in the formation of the New Criticism school.

The term Tension is associated to Allen Tate, he is an American poet, essayist and Poet Laureate as well from 1943- 1944. His essay "Tension in poetry" deals with the Tension as the life of a poem. It reveals Tate's view that a good poem is one in which the Ex-Tension and the In-Tension are in a state of tension. Extension and Intension referred to the denotative and the connotative meanings respectively.

Thus, New Criticism searches for the meaning within the structure of the text. All these complexities altogether constitute the organic unity of the text. It occupies unusual position in the realm of critical theory and in the field of literary studies as well. It has left a lasting imprint on the way we read and write about literature.