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New Criticism is a 20th century formalist literary theory that emerged in the United States, primarily in the 1930s and 1940s, that focused solely on the text itself, and considered it as a self-contained, self-referential entity, that consists the meaning in itself which can be read through elements like rhyme, meter, imagery, metaphor, symbolism, irony, and paradox. The text, according to the New Critics, exists independently of the socio-cultural, economic and other contexts.
New Criticism emerged as a reaction against the "extrinsic" approach of reading a text, considering the socio-economic, cultural aspects of production and understanding the biographical background of the author as foreground of the text. The New Critics felt that this extrinsic approaches of reading to be too subjective that might distract the meaning from the text, denying its aesthetic qualities in favor of external factors like authorial intention, ideologies and readers' subjective perceptions.
Coinage of the term and its chief contributors
- The movement derived its name from John Crowe Ransom's 1941 book The New Criticism. Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, W. K. Wimsatt, and Monroe Beardsley, Allen Tate also made significant contributions to New Criticism.
- A very significant influence was upon this theory T. S. Eliot's critical essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" where Eliot put forward his "theory of impersonality", insisting that poetry must be impersonal, evidently influenced the formation of the New Critical canon.
Funlit with Anushua https://youtu.be/M_NK8TZ0hFg
New Criticism and its Core concepts
- Close reading: The New Critics considered poetry as a special kind of discourse, where form and content are embedded and therefore they advocated a "close reading" of a text. By close reading they intended to emphasize the connotative and associative values of words and the use of the figurative languages like symbol, metaphor, and image in the poetic work as the words and the experience of reading it serves the "meaning" of the poem.
- “the heresy of paraphrase": This term, coined by Cleanth Brooks in his The Well Wrought Urn, refers to a fundamental error of summarizing a poem's meaning in a paraphrase. Brooks contends that form is an intrinsic part of the content and paraphrasing a poem simply distorts its meaning which lies not only in the content but in its intricate structure____ its rhythm, meter, irony, and paradox, which are loses its essence a simplified summary. The poem too is reduced into something less and looses its cadence.
- Intentional and Affective fallacies:New Critics like Wimsatt and Beardsley considered text as an autonomous entity, independent of both author and reader. They emphasized that the merit and meaning of a text is inherent, not attributed. Therefore, in their essay The Verbal Icon, Wimsatt and Beardsley formulated two of the most critical concepts of New Criticism, “Intentional Fallacy” and "Affective fallacy". For them, intentional fallacy was the mistake of attempting to understand the author’s intentions in the interpretation of a literary text. Affective Fallacy, on the other hand, refers to the supposed error of evaluating a text on the basis of its emotional effects on a reader. The New Critics discarded both the authorial intention and the readers' intervention of a text because it may affect the autonomy of the text as T.S. Eliot-in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” said that “Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation, are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.”
Responses : New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, Reader Response Criticism and Psychoanalytic criticism reacted against New Criticism for disregarding the socio-economic, cultural, historical and psychological contexts and regarding text as autonomous entity.
Funlit with Anushua https://youtu.be/M_NK8TZ0hFg
Notable works of New Criticism:
- Seven Types of Ambiguity: William Empson's influential text that brought New Criticism to prominence in the US.
- The New Criticism In this critical work of John Crowe Ransom he emphasizes a close reading of texts, focusing on language, structure, and the nuances of meaning rather than external contexts or authorial intention. Ransom identifies key figures in this movement, notably I. A. Richards, whose ideas on tone, intention, and dramatic situations form a foundation for understanding poetry.
- Understanding Poetry : Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren wrote this critical work to discuss how to apply New Critical methods to the teaching of poetry.
- The Verbal Icon: Wimsatt and Beardsley formulated the critical concepts of “Intentional Fallacy” and "Affective fallacy" .
- The Well Wrought Urn : Cleanth Brooks in this book coined the term “the heresy of paraphrase".
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