Discussion Topic
New Criticism Analysis of Poetry and Short Stories
Summary:
New Criticism, emerging in the early 20th century, focuses on analyzing a poem or short story solely through its text, disregarding the author's background or historical context. This approach emphasizes close reading, examining literary and rhetorical devices to derive meaning. While it highlights the importance of language, it overlooks external influences, such as an author's personal experiences, that can enrich interpretation. Despite its decline in popularity, New Criticism's emphasis on close textual engagement remains influential in literary studies.
How does New Criticism approach critique a poem?
The New Critical approach to criticism arose in the early part of the twentieth century, starting around 1930 and associated with a journal called Scrutiny. The crucial focus of New Criticism is the text or words of the poem. Before New Criticism, the old criticism focused the biography of the author and the sources that influenced the author's work. In biographical criticism, people asked, how does what we know about the life of the author inform the poem we are reading? In source studies, people would ask, what poems or other literature did the writer read that influenced how he wrote the poem? Is she imitating another poem or poetic style?
New Criticism thrusts all that aside and asks "How can we interpret the poem solely based on the words in the poem?" What if we knew absolutely nothing about the life of the poet or what he read? What...
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meaning could we construct if all we had were the words on the page?
Therefore, New Criticism focuses on the words in the poem. How does the poet use language: Does he use similes or metaphors? Does he or she use vivid images? Does he or she use irony? What is the theme of the poem? What is the subject? What is the setting? What are the characters like? All of these are what the New Critic examines, or as the name of the journal Scrutiny suggests, scrutinizes deeply.
How is the theory of New Criticism used to analyze a poem or short story?
Unlike other critical schools, New Criticism does not take into account the author's individual background or the historical context in which they were writing. Rather, New Criticism says that the reader should approach the text as a self-contained unit. The primary mode of critical investigation here is close reading: a careful, sustained examination of language on a very localized level—the paragraph, the sentence, the line. This attention to language is where critical interest lies for the New Critic. Literary and rhetorical devices are where meaning is generated.
How would a New Critic approach, for example, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse? Style would be a key consideration. Woolf writes in long, meandering sentences that sometimes encompass more than one character's point of view. The New Critic would ask what difference this style makes and how it shapes the way we view the characters. One possible interpretation would be that Woolf's style is very fluid, drifting from one thought to another within a character's point of view and then drifting into another character's point of view just as fluidly. Even though the characters often feel isolated from one another, the text formally suggests that they are actually connected. This apparent friction between form and content generates productive critical questions.
What are the limitations of New Criticism, though? Woolf modeled the Ramsays after her parents, and in letters, she revealed that writing the novel was a way to come to terms with her mother's death when she was thirteen. Naturally, the text itself does not disclose this information; the reader would have to learn about this through a secondary source. With New Criticism, this information is out of bounds as far as interpretation is concerned, since it is not contained within the text. What would be lost? Without this information, readers may not pick up on the implicit mother-daughter dynamic of Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe. The meaning Mrs. Ramsay had for Lily may not be as clear, and her struggle to honor Mrs. Ramsay's memory while simultaneously pulling away from her may not be as impactful.
New Criticism has largely fallen out of favor with literary scholars over the last few decades, eclipsed by critical schools that seek to contextualize a text in a specific place and time. Close reading is still a staple of the literature classroom, though. The emphasis on close engagement with the language of a text may be New Criticism's lasting contribution to scholarly practice.