New Criticism
NEW CRITICISM
How New Criticism Evolved?
We must understand that the critical movement and literary developments of a particular period are both continuation of and reaction to developments that precede them. New Criticism is no exception; it is a reaction against the romantic critical principles. But it is also continuation of some important insights of the Romantics. In the first place, discussion on Coleridge’s conception of creative role would be in order. Coleridge, s you know, stresses upon the role of imagination and explains how it brings together disparate images and contrary impulses, maintaining a balance of opposites. This idea of balancing power of imagination stands in agreement with the new critical conception of poetic text as ‘organic unity’, and their notion of how form and meaning are inseparably fused into unique poetic experience.
Coleridge also says that poetry brigs the whole soul of man into activity. Poetic creation engages not just one aspect of the poet’s personality; it involves the whole person. New critics hold that poetry combines both the intellectual and emotional aspects of human experience.( Of course, it is an experience experienced by the poet.)
T.S.Eliot’s idea of ‘objective correlative’ also inspires the new critical ethos. It is about the nature of textual experience and, by extension, tells about the nature and origin of poetic emotions . Poetic emotions are emotions generated by the poem, and are not identical with the emotions actually felt by the poet. What, then, is the origin of poetic emotions? How does poetry generate emotions if they do not emanate from the poet? Eliot says that it is a specific event, object or a chain of incidents that create a corresponding emotional atmosphere. (Though Eliot specifically elaborates the idea in relation to the play Hamlet by Shakespeare, this idea does not contradict his notion of how poetic emotions are generated in a poem.) Hence, poetic emotions are consequent on the particular way in which poetic experiences get organized into a text.( Consult a glossary to understand Eliot’s concept better.) how will a reader come to terms with these emotions, then? The Romantics would say: by going back to the poet, to his/her moments of experiencing emotions before he/she embody them in the poem. The New Critics’ answer would be: forget the poet, go straight to the poem itself, read it closely, see the inter-relationships within the text, and explore the emotion—the unique poetic emotion.
New Criticism began in America. There existed a group, called ‘the Fugitive’ in Nashville, Tennessee in the 1920s. The group had members like john Crowe Ransom, Alan Tate, Robert P. Warren and others. This group in 1930s re-organized themselves into a broad-based group called ‘the agrarians’. They published essays and lectures defending and celebrating the South against the materialistic and industrial North. They celebrated the organic unity of the South. The group ended in 1937. Ransom left the South and was at a college in Ohio, and founded the Kenyon Review. The conservative attitude of the fugitive actually paves the way for the new critical notion of literature as the repository of universal, timeless values.
There also developed some connections between the new Critics and the Russian Formalists. More, there were also connections and sharing of ideas between the American New Critics and their English counterpart.
New Criticism: Key Texts
New Criticism, at a practical level, is a method of reading, a reading practice. This aspect is well elaborated in two foundational texts Practical Criticism (1929) by I. A. Richards, and Understanding Poetry ( ) by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. Richards taught English at Cambridge, and was at pains to develop an appropriate teaching method. He felt that students of literature at Cambridge had never been taught to focus on the words before them on the page. Students are unable to comprehend meaning, and not sensitive to nuances of words. Practical Criticism propounds the basic tenet of New Critical method: look at the poem, read it closely, see the words on the page, and explore meaning. In the same vein, Understanding Poetry grapples with the same problem of reading poetry, and contends that language functions in a different way in poetry (or in literature, for that matter,) than it does elsewhere. So, a reader must acknowledge this and see how language plays the key role in the formation of meaning.
William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) states how a poem works as a poem, as a complex of meaning. Metaphors and connotations are active forces that generate multiple meanings in a poem. Words in poem do not carry fixed meaning. They are ambiguous aand carry multiple associations and meanings. Ambiguity is inherent property of language.
Key Concepts
1. Literature is no passive expression of the writer’s emotions and thought. It is basically a system of language. You can say “ we cannot do without language . We need language for all kinds of communication, not just for literature. But new critics say that language functions in literature in different way from how it does elsewhere. If you say at your home ‘I need some tea.’ , you obviously use language but it is instantly comprehensible and directed at fulfilling an immediate need—need for a cup of tea. This language is functional. But language works differently in poetry. When the poet W. B. Yeats says in the poem The Second Coming:
Turning and turning into the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
This language is different; it is not intended for an utilitarian goal. It is governed by a different set of rules. It is an organic system of relationships. You have to ask yourself such questions as: why are some words used repetitively? What is the implication of ‘widening gyre’? what effect is achieved through use of rhyming words? Is this language same as ‘ I need some tea’?
But literary language is not useless, either. Literary language explores the complexity of reality of society, of life, and fulfills some other need of human being, which cannot be branded as ‘utilitarian’.
Hence, a key concept of New Criticism is –exposition of the unique nature of literary language and its difference from non-literary uses of language.
2. Autonomy of the literary text: there are, to new critics, clear boundaries between the text and the world. A reader should not look at the text in terms of its links to the world outside, but focus on the system off relationships within the text. A poem exists, what matters is its existence. Of course the poem has its own meaning.( It is important to note that New Criticism does not deny the existence of meaning.) but you cannot separate meaning from the texture of the poem. Meaning is inseparably linked to the ways in which the text organizes language and establishes relationships amongst its different textual/linguistic items. You must look at meaning in conjunction with the concrete and total poetic experience offered by the poem. You cannot extract its meaning and translate it into another medium. You cannot express the meaning of the poem in the language of prose, because prose language is governed by different systems or rules. Suppose you have poured some milk into a glass of water. Can you now separate the milk from the water?
3. A major textual approach is ‘intentional fallacy’. Wimsatt and Beardsley attack the fallacy of intention; they say that knowledge about the authorial intention is irrelevant to judgment of a literary text. (How will you, for instance, understand W. B. Yeats’s poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”? the New Critics would say: don’t ask Yeats about his intentions behind the poem; read the poem, instead.) wimsatt and Beardsley attack the idea of intentionality on two grounds.
i. Intention is never clear; there can always be dispute on the issue (whereas the poem is a publicly available object of study.)
ii. Intention would threaten the autonomy of the text, and locate the text in derivative terms.
Think about it: The new critics, it seems, sought to do away with the idea of author. But remember, they do not deny the existence of intention. They only say that it is not necessary to bring in the author into the scene; further, the author would create trouble. The question of ‘who says this’ would marginalize important issues of ‘what is said’ and ‘how it is said’.
4.
Affective fallacy’ is another textual approach. They hold that it would be fallacious to judge a work of art in terms of its emotional effect upon the reader. It would result in vague impressionism and relativism. In that case, we will forget the dynamics of the text.
Do you , then ,think that the New Critics’ insistence on the text’s autonomy and importance of its inner relationships has become a sort of dogma , beyond which they could not think? Do not the emotions embodied in the text affect the reader? They do. But the effect does not determine the value of a text. The text, after all, has its own way of creating emotions. Remember T S Eliot and his ‘objective correlative’.
Legacy
Though New Criticism would not share the historical approach of Matthew Arnold, it carries the Arnoldian moralist agenda. To them, literature provides alternative to a real world full of chaos, contradiction and anarchy. The text, unlike the world engulfed by disorder, is a coherent whole; though there are paradoxes, ironies and contradictions within a text, literary language balances them and establishes certain integrity and coherence. Literature is also thought of as the repository of timeless values. The question, however, remains: can we take these ‘eternal values’ for granted?
Though New Critics talks about the autonomy of the text, they basically focus on poetry. Not all kinds of poetry are object of their study. They promote the practice of close reading and seek to explore how the poem utilized the resources of language. And the traits they seek to study are most evident in lyric poetry. Thus, New Criticism also influenced the process of poetic canon formation. Robert Frost, Eliot, Ezra Pound and some others received critical attention, while john Milton’s reputation suffered.
Various schools of critical thought and theory brought to light the limitations of New Criticism. Inter-textual criticism, for instance, holds that a text is linked to many other texts with are inscribed within it. Secondly, post-structuralist theories hold that the author is no coherent self, and that there are ideological and discursive forces at work behind the formation of subjectivity. And it has crucial connections to how a text endorses or despises certain ideological position. Thirdly, reader response criticism sees a text not as a special unit but as a sequential or temporal unit , and attend to the ways in which a reader comes to gripse with text and plays an active role in generating meaning through complex interactions with the text that involves a process of concretization . This is in stark opposition to the idea of affective fallacy.
More importantly, New Criticism alienates a text from its historical and social contexts. More recent criticism such as New Historicism transcends this limit of New Criticism and asserts that a text is intrinsically bound up with the contexts of it production and distribution. Remove these contexts and you will narrow down the text’s broad semantic field. How can you, for instance, separate a text like Hard Times by Charles Dickens from the historical context of Industrial Revolution and its accompanying philosophy of utilitarianism? How can you read a poem like “The Second Coming” from the context of post World War trauma and violent anarchy let loose in the social life of Europe?