thelit New cRiticism

EVA NUR MAZIDAH
120710209
THEORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

NEW CRITICISM


New Criticism-> 1940s-1960s
• Reader-Response Criticism opposes New Criticism's definition of the literary text and method of interpreting it, and Structuralism rejects New Criticism's focus on the individual literature work in isolation from other literature and from other cultural productions. Deconstruction’s theory of language and new historicism's view of objective evidence are directly opposed to new critical assumptions about language and objectivity.`
• New Criticism: "the text itself" the sole source of evidence for interpreting it and "internal fallacy" to refer to the mistaken belief that the author's intention is the same as the meaning of the text.
• Affective fallacy confuses the text with it affects (with emotion it produces)
• Intentional fallacy confuses the text with its origins
• Affective Fallacy leads to (a) impressionistic responses(don't like a character, the character must be evil) (b) relativism (the text means whatever any reader thinks it means). The final outcome of the practice is chaos (no standard for interpreting or evaluating).
• for New criticism, a literature work is a timeless, autonomous (self sufficient) verbal object.
• To do new Critical reading, what should be asked is how this piece works. Look for complexcities in the text: paradoxes, ironies, and ambiguities. Find unifying idea or theme which resolves these tensions.
• Lit. language is expressive; it communicates tone, attitude, and feeling and organizes ling. resources into a special arrangement, a complex unity to create an aesthetic experience, a world of its own.
• How a literary text means is inseparable from what it means (organic unity).
• Organic unity > complexity and order.
• Complexcity of the text > product of linguistic devices.
• Paradox > seems self-contradictory but represents the actual way things are.
• Irony > a statement event undermined by the context where it occurs.
• Ambiguity > a word, image, or event generates two or more different meanings (source of richness, depth, and complexity).
• Tension > dynamic interplay among the text's opposing tendencies such paradoxes, Ironies, and ambiguities.
• Besides those above, New Criticism also needs to define the figurative language such imageries, symbols, metaphors, and similes.
• New Criticism treated psychoanalogical, sosiological, and philosophical content the same way they treated the text's formal elements.
• Intrinsic Criticism > denote that they stayed within the confines of the text itself.
• Extrinsic Criticism > goes outside the lit. Text for the tools needed to interpret it.
• Objective criticism > focus on each text own formal elements insured would dictate how it would be interpreted.
• New Criticism > close reading.