New Criticism: Methods and Principles in Literary Analysis
New Criticism: Ideas and Methods
Popularizing Literature
New Critics contemplated literature as an element of communication and preservation of traditional values. The first step was to popularize it. Only the high intellectual classes read literature, so they made it extremely pedagogical because everybody wants to have access to it.
Key Strategies
- Staffing University Departments with Critics: Little by little, they replaced the historians at the top of the departments with critics. The assistants and professors began to be replaced also by critics, focusing on the text.
- Founding Greatly Influential Journals: All these journals were crucial in the extension of New Criticism throughout society.
- Publishing Extremely Influential Textbooks: In 1936, they published An Approach to Literature. After that, they published a series of three books focused on specific genres: Understanding Poetry, Understanding Fiction, and Understanding Drama.
Genre Preferences
For New Critics, the purest literary object was the lyrical poem, so the purest genre was poetry because it is very short and you can employ the method they were promoting. Their movement pushed them to the principle of “short is better.” Drama was last because it had an economic component which contaminated it.
Shared Principles
Both branches of New Criticism (Practical Critics and American New Critics) share common points:
- Both were text-centered schools of criticism. They believed the text was autonomous and it could be understood and studied. To understand a text, it was unnecessary to know the author, the period in which it was composed, or the social conditions surrounding it.
- Peculiar Choice of Text: They tended to choose texts which followed certain conditions, but they didn’t realize what they were doing. They chose texts offered by white, middle/high-class European males. They said that a shorter poem is better. They came to associate literature with short texts.
Conception of Literary Work
There are a few ways of considering a literary text. A few years ago, it was considered a social transaction. The author was the responsible party for the meaning of a text, and they thought that the text was a precious object, something you could touch and feel, a physical object that you can compare with a sculpture or a jewel.
Practical Considerations
Richards was opposed to contextualism and historicism, to psychologism, or anything outside the poem. These rejections arose from the idea of cleansing literature from external interferences. He wanted to rescue literary studies from historicism, philology, etc. They wanted to create a new discipline, separate from the rest of similar fields.
American New Critics
American Criticism was more radical than Richards in defending that literature is exclusively words on a page. He fell back on the mistake of considering the context (the reader) as the central element of criticism. They looked back at the history of criticism and they found mistakes, so they codified these mistakes in four fallacies:
- Intentional Fallacy: When the critic commits mistakes with the intention of the author and the meaning of the text; to discuss, pay attention, and focus on the author’s supposed intention as if it were the work itself, believing that you are analyzing the work.
- Affective Fallacy: When you study the reader’s reactions and you are convinced that you are studying the work.
- Mimetic Fallacy: When critics believe the literary world is a historical document, completely transparent, and you can see the world. The world in literary works has no relation whatsoever with the real world. When you pretend to study the world instead of the text, you are committing the Mimetic Fallacy.
- Communicative Fallacy: When you believe that poetry communicates. For New Critics, poetry is not a communicative instrument; poems exist, but they do not communicate in the way that language does.