NEW CRITICISM

REFERENCE: http://public.wsu.edu/~delahoyd/lit.crit.html

New Criticism is one of several ways of looking at and analyzing literature. It is a form of criticism that gives importance to the textual properties of the text. Close reading of the text is theory of New Criticism. According to this theory, we should judge books the same way. Rather than worrying about the author's background or our own reactions to a book, we should evaluate it based only on the text itself. New Criticism went on to become a popular method of literary analysis throughout the middle of the twentieth century.

New critical approach focuses the attention on the literary text as the only sources of interpretation. Rather than giving importance to historical background, social background and biographical background; New Critics give importance to the textual elements. When the critics value plot, character, language, form, image and so on, it is the new critical approach of interpreting the text. If the critics give priority to the writers thinking, it is intentional fallacy and when the critics value what the readers feel about the text it is about affective fallacy. According to the intentional fallacy, it's impossible to determine an author's reasons for writing a text without directly asking him or her. And even if we did determine the author's intentions, they don't matter, because the text itself carries its own value. So even if we're reading a book by a renowned author like Shakespeare, we shouldn't let the author's reputation taint our evaluation of the text. Similarly, the affective fallacy claims that we shouldn't waste time thinking about the effect a text may have on the reader because then we're polluting the text with our own personal baggage. So we should ignore how 'beautiful' a poem may be or our reactions to an emotional novel. If we give in to our emotional reactions, we're less able to evaluate the text objectively. So, critics should avoid intentional and affective fallacies. What the critics should do according to the new critics is to analyze the formal elements of giving importance to literary work as timeless autonomous verbal object. As textual properties always remain the same, despite the fact that readers and readings way change. Rather than giving importance to paraphrasing, they give priority to images features and linguistic behavior. So, New Criticism emphasizes explication, or "close reading," of "the work itself." It rejects old historicism's attention to biographical and sociological matters. 

Thus, New Criticism attempts to be a science of literature, with a technical vocabulary for the new critics the text is sole and whole in itself. The interpreters should not go beyond the text and search for the outside elements. They should seek the elements that are within the text. To do New Critical reading, ask yourself, "How does this piece work?" Look for complexities in the text: paradoxes, ironies, ambiguities. Find a unifying idea or theme which resolves these tensions.

LITERARY LANGUAGE & ORGANIC UNITY

New criticism dominated literary studies from the 1940's through the 1960's. It has left a lasting imprint on the way we read and write about literature. New Criticism values close reading, textual properties and organic unity of the outside elements and interpretation. It gives importance to literary language and organic unity. Literary interpretation which New Criticism called “close reading” has been a standard method in literary studies for the past several decades.

Although the author’s intention or the reader’s response is sometimes mentioned in New Critical readings of literary texts, neither one is the focus of analysis. If a given author’s intention or a given reader’s interpretation actually represents the text’s meaning is to carefully examine or “closely read”, all the evidence provided by the language of the text itself: its images, symbols, metaphors, rhyme, meter, point of view, setting, characterization are called its “formal elements”. For New Criticism, a literary work is a “timeless”, “autonomous verbal object”. Readers and readings may change but the literary text stays the same. Its meaning is as objective as its physical existence in the page.

Literary language is different from day to day language. For New Criticism, literary language is very different from scientific language and from everyday language. Similarly, organic unity of the literary work refers to the inter-connection of different parts to make the work as an inseparable whole. Due to the use of language that contains symbol, images, metaphor and so on, literary language is different from day-to-day language. Literary language appeals to different sense organs so as to motivate the readers. Organic Unity is a linguistic device which is likely to generate figures of speech, ambiguity, complexity, paradox, irony, ambiguity and tension in the text. Either it is a piece of poem or a novel, there has to be the organic unity. It is possible to identify the organic unity only through the textual properties. New Critics give importance to the different elements that are found within the text.

Paradox is a statement that seems self-contradictory but represents the actual way things are. New criticism observed that paradox is responsible for much of the complexity of human experience and of the literature thus portrays it. Irony means a statement or event under-mined by the context in which it occurs. New criticism primarily valued irony to indicate a text’s inclusion of varying perspectives on the same characters or events.

Ambiguity occurs when a word, image, or event generates two or more different meaning. In scientific and everyday language, ambiguity is usually considered a flaw because it’s equated with a lack of clarity and precision. In literary language ambiguity is considered a source of richness, depth, and complexity that adds to the text’s value.

Tension means the linking together of opposites. The complexity of a literary text is created by it. Tension is created by the integration of the abstract and the concrete images. Such concrete images and fictional characters that are meaningful on both the concrete level are considered a form of tension because they hold together the opposing realms of physical reality and symbolic reality in a way characteristic of literary language. Tension is also created by dynamic interplay among the text’s opposing tendencies, among its paradoxes, ironies, and ambiguities.

If an image occurs repeatedly in a text, it probably has symbolic significance. A symbol is an image that has both literal and figurative meaning. Public symbols are usually easy to spot. For example, spring is usually a symbol of rebirth or youth; autumn is usually a symbol of death or dying, a river is usually a symbol of life or of a journey. Thus, a symbol has properties similar to those of the abstract idea it stands for. The example, a river can symbolize life because both a river and life are fluid and forward moving; both have a source and an endpoint.

A ‘metaphor’ has only figurative meaning. A metaphor is a comparison of two dissimilar objects in which the properties of one are ascribed to the other. For example, the phrase “my mother is a gem” is a metaphor. It has no literal meaning. It would mean that my mother gave birth to a crystalline stone. The figurative meaning of the phrase is that my mother shares certain properties with a gem. Thus, “he’s a gem” is generally used to mean “he’s a great guy”. To get from metaphor to ‘simile’ requires one small step: add ‘like’ or ‘as’. “My mother is like a gem” or “my brother is as valuable as a gem” are similes that make the same comparison as the metaphor. The simile is softer because the connection between the idea of “brother” and the idea of “gem” is less direct or less forceful.

NEW CRITICISM AS INTRINSIC, OBJECTIVE CRITICISM:

(Intrinsic: Belonging to a thing by its very nature)

New Criticism values the formal textual elements of the literary text for analyzing and interpreting any literary works. It values inside properties objectively. So, it is intrinsic and objective criticism.

New Criticism is intrinsic criticism because interpretations of the text are completely based on the elements that are found within the text. It don’t value the biography, history and any imposed philosophy for the interpretation of the text. Psychoanalysis goes beyond and tries to search the link between biography and the text, Marxism goes beyond and tries to find represent of class struggle: but new criticism confines only within the text. It is objective criticism because the focus is not on what the readers feel but what is there in the text.

As new criticism gives importance to the internal, formal, elements it is known as intrinsic and objective criticism. It is so because it only highlights the organic unity of the text giving importance to language and content.

THE SINGLE BEST INTERPRETATION:

New Critics value that a text contains only one best interpretation. The interpretation can be found through the organic unity of the text. According to New Critics, the best criticism is one that explains what the text means and how the text produces that meaning. In other words, the best criticism always aims at explaining its organic unity.

New Critical reading is a mode of interpretation according to which the analysis of imagery, role of narrator, minor character or some other formal elements are valued. For this reason, New Critics paid special attention to textual features, and considered short poems and stories most suitable for close reading. This type of reading is independent of history, culture, society and author. The text contains only one accurate meaning. That meaning might be found on the basis of the survey of other critics’ interpretation. It is not useful for long novels and dramas for the reason that it intends to search organic unity. Longer texts like novels, poems, and plays provides broader spectrum of textual elements, and they limit themselves on some particular aspects or certain area of the work such as imagery, role of narrator, the function of the time in the work, etc.

For this new critical reading there lies only one single best interpretation of the text. The function of the critic is to find the organic unity and interpret the text from the single mode. New Criticism is already out of practice today, we still integrate some of its prominent principles to support our interpretation. To sum up, New Criticism considers its approach the best as it is founded on the objective analysis/interpretation of literary texts.

NEW CRITICAL READING OF THE GREAT GATSBY

New Criticism focuses fundamentally on the text itself and concentrates on “close reading.” No outside forces or shapers need to be examined. We do not need to know about the history of the author. In fact, New Critics had a term called intentional fallacy to say that the “author’s intention is [not] the same as the meaning of the text.” And affective fallacy does not let a reader’s feeling about the events of a text to interfere with the text itself.

The literary language is the meaning of the work, down to individual words. Changing one word changes the text. There is an organic unity to the text that makes every word play off each other. New Critics praise paradox, irony, and ambiguity in the words of a text. Context allows us to trace the meaning of a symbol in a text.

New Critics try to find that “single best interpretation” of a work. However, longer works tended to hurt this theory. The Great Gatsby has a Universal Theme and when analyzed by New Criticism, a reader can gather a time-capsule image of this theme during a time period of the 1920s. It is the American Dream. Gatsby as a central character undertakes this theme almost solely. Tom Buchanan never had to work for his money and takes it for granted in the book, seeing the advancement of other races as a threat to his power. Gatsby personifies this American Dream in that he strove to reach it.

• As New Criticism sees plot, characters, images, symbols, irony, ambiguity, paradox, language and tension within the text, The Great Gatsby is studied by new critics as the chronicle of Jazz movement in America.
• Mostly, New Criticism analyzes the central tension in the novel than that between Gatsby and the world in which he lives.
• The characters of The Great Gatsby like Wolfsheim’s (We don't know a lot about Meyer Wolfsheim – and we're not supposed to. Beyond the fact that he's a business associate and a friend of Gatsby's, all we know is that he's an inhabitant of New York. Although Wolfsheim remains a mystery, we end up learning quite a lot about other characters through him.) exploitiveness, Daisy’s duplicity, Tom’s treachery, Jordan’s dishonesty, Myrtle’s vulgarity and the shallowness of American populace (world) is analyzed from a New Critical perspective.
• New Critics see textual central tension between the world of corrupt, vulgar materialism portrayed in the novel and the lyric, imagery, the wasteful beauty and emotional force of which make it the most memorable and revealing dimension of the novel so frequently used to describe that world.
• New Critics analyze Gatsby’s party guests as parasitical (bloodsucking) who’s moral had declined with each passing year.
• There is the world of impermanence, instability, vulgarity, romance within the text. The Great Gatsby while seeing from New Critical modality.
• There is the use of symbols, metaphors, irony in The Great Gatsby. For example: the valley of ashes, the name Nick gives to the damping ground near which George and Myrtle Wilson live-is a metaphor for the spiritual poverty of this world.
• Mostly, New Critics see Gatsby’s capacity to dream and to devote himself to the woman who embodies that dream, including his blindness to the fact that she doesn't deserve his devotion.
•  Further, Gatsby represents “the energy of the spirits resistance” and “immunity to the final contamination” of “cheapness and vulgarity.” For the critics, Gatsby is destroyed by the society in which he is living.
• As nostalgia for the lost past, as dreams of future fulfillment, and as vague, under-defined longing that has no special goal are lyric imageries used to inform characterization in the novel.
• The novel has maintained its “hallowed place in American literature” because it speaks to something deep in the heart of human experience.

KEY POINTS:

• History and Author’s biography is less important than structure.
• For New Criticism: “whole is important than the sum of the individual parts.”
• Good application to short poems/literary texts.
• Claims that the work’s structure and genre are crucial to its meaning i.e. “form and content cannot be separated in determining meaning.”
• Determines how the various elements of plot, character, language, etc. reinforce the meaning and unify the work.
• New Critics re-direct critical attention from the external to the internal (textual), “the text and the text alone” approach.
• All formal elements of a text work together to create an organic unity.
• Key principles to seek when interpreting a text are tension, paradox, irony, and ambiguity.