New Criticism and Roman Rhetorical-Poetic Tradition
New Criticism
Under this name, taken from the work of John Ransom entitled The New Criticism (1941), refers to a current that occurred in the United States starting in the 1930s.
The New Criticism shows greater methodological dispersion, due in large part to the heterogeneity of its members. Their contribution is convergent with Russian formalism and stylistics in the dual commitment to propose a renewal of traditional literary studies and to do so in the sense of an immanent poetics. That is, the New Criticism reinforces the autonomy of the work and literary criticism, emphasizing the specificity of the literary act as an aesthetic phenomenon that is governed by peculiar verbal structures that differentiate it from other nonliterary languages.
The method of analysis of New Criticism is descriptive and detailed. In the study of poetic language, it affects all levels but especially the semantic, after which it tries to penetrate the inner structure of the work. In that way, it focuses especially on metaphors.
New Critics should avoid falling into certain fallacies or errors into which non-immanent critics had fallen. These would be:
- The intentional fallacy, which is to try to seek the interpretation of a text.
- Another fallacy, the affective, would want to determine the values of a poem based on the impact that reading has on readers.
- For its part, the fallacy of imitation produces the risk of considering the poem as a reflection of an event or life experience of the poet.
- Finally, the fallacy of experimental communication lies in the belief that a text only reaches the peak of its form when it is thought to have made a correct interpretation of the conceptual contents thereof, regardless of the fact that poetic language is marked precisely by its features of ambiguity, polysemy, symbolism, and metaphor.
Despite the influence of New Criticism in the teaching of literature in America, its influence was slowing down, mainly due to the criticism it received.
Roman Tradition
The main feature is the rhetorical-poetic synthesis that A. Fontan spoke of in an article entitled Cicero and Horace, Literary Critics. The synthesis theory attempts to counteract this trend of literary practice.
Rhetoric was restricted because, in its teaching influenced by the increasingly powerful grammarians, it tended to reduce it to one of its parts, elocutio, that is, the expression or style.
With respect to rhetoric, it is Cicero who tries to save, as far as possible, the oratorical tradition. Roman rhetoric is so associated with the name of Cicero that it is called ‘Ciceronian’. One of the most important ideas of that tradition is that rhetoric is still considered part of political science, and therefore, persuasive efficiency is still considered the main criterion of good speech.
Horace’s work must also be understood in this context of the approach between rhetoric and poetics as an attempt to counter the trends in the theory of poetic practice.
In the formulation of one of his famous dualities, in which ‘the poets want to be helpful or delight or say, at once pleasant and good things to life’, Horace seems to opt for the ideal that is rightly called classical and consists in combining aesthetic and pragmatic purposes.
In this way, Horace seeks to change the course of the art of his time, and he warned the poets who overvalue technical-linguistic work that “sometimes a book without any art and light, more brilliant ideas, and well-drawn characters delights and retains more about the public than lines without any background and harmonious trifles.” In the same way, Cicero said that “to write well, reason is the principle and source.” Cicero and Horace were able to merge the two into a synthesis technique, rhetoric and poetics, without dissolving the specificity and saving lives around the elocutive restriction.