The New Criticism Flashcards
Wimsatt, Brooks
How does new criticism see literature?
The New Critics created a special aesthetic space
for poetry that would preserve it from all
external forces.
They see literature in opposition to the
encroaching technocratic culture. (e.g. literary
journal Scrutiny placed emphasis on the moral
dimension of poetry)
What view does New Criticism offer?
The New Criticism offers an ontological view of
literature. The text is seen as a linguistic construct which
speaks its own truth.
The reign of positivism brings loss of
irony,
metaphor, symbolism, paradox, ambiguity.
What did the New Critics seek to accomplish regarding poetry
The New Critics sought to build an aesthetic wall
around poetry that would preserve it as a
complete, self-enclosed artifact that obeyed its
own laws.
The New Criticism offers a
formal approach to
the study of literature.
A poem is treated
as a timeless microcosm, over
which the physical, historical forces of decay
and change (not to mention the laws of
science) could have no power.
Close reading
is a critical principle of the New
Critics, an orientation toward an immanent
analysis, which claims the priority of text over
the reader.
Axes/frames of close reading
The semantic context;
The syntactic context;
The thematic context;
The iterative context;
The generic context.
Remember: words open up through interrelations
and their cruxes and patterns.
Close reading highlights
the opaqueness of poetic
language as a source of aesthetic appreciation.
intentional fallacy
Focus on the psychological causes of poetry
affective fallacy.
Focus on the psychological effects of poetry
Affective fallacy is an error
of judgment made when
focusing on the effect the text has on the reader.
Intentional fallacy is an error
of judgment made
when defining the meaning of a text in terms of
the author’s intentions
Critical judgment must be based
on the standards
inherent in the poem.
Analysis demands a focus on
the aesthetic integrity
of the poem as an immanent structure.
Wimsatt and Beardsley reject both
he expressive
view of poetry as an extension of the poet and the
pragmatic view of poetry as something that either
teaches or pleases or causes sublimity.
Cleanth Brooks
(1906 – 1994)
The author of
The Well-Wrought
Urn, published
in 1947.
The New Critical assumption is that the greatest
poems…
…do not present their ideas directly, but
through a complex deflection of meaning.
Compare Brooks’s observations to those made by
Viktor Shklovsky – what do the two agree
upon
Both Cleanth Brooks and Viktor Shklovsky agree on the importance of artistic technique, defamiliarization to provoke new perspectives, the role of perception in understanding literature, and the necessity of close reading for deeper analysis of texts. Despite their different backgrounds, they share fundamental principles in literary criticism.
Brooks uses…
he metaphor of the arch to show how
the poems both work and mean.
The poem balances contradictions and thereby…
…achieves equilibrium.
The New Criticism places its focus on
canonical
works, a body of works that is thought to be
inherently superior and to possess essential,
timeless value
The text is seen…
as a self-contained system, in
which meanings are closed off; they are fixed
and determined as changeless over time,
regardless of the range of different readers.
What is required for reading in NC?
Reading requires competence in literary
tradition and sensitivity to meanings as shaped
by the different semantic axes in the text.
The emphasis is placed on
close reading
. Analysis of texts requires
skill in language,
linguistics, and rhetoric.
The New Criticism used words like
heresy and
fallacy to stigmatise those who would move
outside the poem or deny their conception of
poetry.
The New Critics were concerned….
not just with what a text means, but how a text works
The critic was viewed as
disinterested, working
in a supposedly objective, unbiased way and
allowing the formalities of the close reading
technique to highlight the meanings of the text
