ABSTRACT
The most significant influences on New Criticism were the scrupulous text-oriented literary interpretations of I.A. Richards. But the movement called New Criticism consisted chiefly of the expatriate poet T.S. Eliot and three writers from the American south: John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren. It is largely a North American phenomenon even though it has significant parallels with the work of the British critics F.R. Leavis and William Empson. Through its emphasis on questions of literary form, New Criticism expressed a poet’s interest in the possibilities of language. This entailed an aesthetic theory that moved the interest of criticism away from the author’s life towards a detailed engagement with the language of literature and thus marked a decisive shift away from philology, source hunting and literary biography to textual analysis. Although its emphasis on close reading was admirably suited to the classroom and still remains the starting point of most theoretically inspired interpretations, the intellectual premises of New Criticism were so firmly ingrained in a narrow conservative, agrarian ideology that it became the target of fierce attacks. New Criticism’s insistent focus on the text was the result of
understanding the work of art as a timeless and self-contained artefact. Although its interest in the materiality of the text also touched upon questions concerning text production, the institutionalised practice of applying New Critical methodology disconnected literature from its social context, so that, by and large, it became equated with an exclusive interest in the words on the page. This emphasis was testified by the publications of its chief representatives: most notably Cleanth Brooks’s and Robert Penn Warren’s series of textbooks, among them Brooks’s Understanding Poetry (1938) and The Well Wrought Urn (1949). Other representatives are Monroe Beardsley and R.P. Blackmur. Although the emphasis on form had started out as a means of introducing questions concerning the economic requirements for the production of art, it was appropriated as a bourgeois aesthetic in which the high valuation of rhetorical complexity displaced the need for political commitment. In the theory propounded by W.K. Wimsatt, the text was defined as being ‘iconic’: literary language figured as an end in itself and literature was taken to describe a world which differed from all historically perceived reality because it was thought to express a universally true perception of what it meant to be human (The Verbal Icon (1958)). This was as much as to say that literature represents profound human problems
which are independent of both author and historical context, and it is in the appeal to this fundamental sense of humanity that the critic can understand and explicate the full meaning of a work of art. The emphasis on close reading is the result of a critical theory
which focused on the workings of language rather than on the psychology of the author. At its best, however, it combined an investigation of linguistic structures with a more open-minded interest in the psychology and sociology of language production. Although his work stands apart from New Criticism, William Empson had considerable influence on the movement. Two of his books, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1953), written at a time when New Criticism was about to take off as a critical practice, and the later The Structure of Complex Words (1951), combine close attention to textual-semantic details with a discussion of culturally salient ideas. But it has to be noted that Empson always incorporated contextual considerations into his interpretations, and his work on ambiguity was careful not to posit an ultimate reconciliation through notions of ‘paradox, irony’, etc. Recent approaches to art, especially those taking a deconstruc-
tionist line, also engage in minute textual analysis and concentrate on contradictory moments of the text. The chief difference is that New Criticism treated literature as an object that would reveal the complexities of life through its self-referential emphasis on rhetorical complexities (such as paradox, oxymoron, ambiguity, tension, irony). Poetry, especially, was taken as the highest cultural achievement because its rhetorical patterns were believed to express the possibility of reconciling contradictions, by analogy with the firmly defined system of beliefs held by Western society and Christian religion. The subsequent objections to it voiced by those who struggled for the recognition of gender and racial rights showed that even though New Critical readings may have been immensely sensitive to the contradictory semantic potential of the texts, their ultimate conclusions were politically unacceptable. This is because the method adopted by the New Critics typically reduced the meaning of a text to a singular and all-inclusive statement about the individual’s existence as a member of Western (patriarchal and bourgeois) society. In contrast to this, a deconstructive critical practice, especially if it engages in politically motivated Marxist, feminist or post-colonial criticism, highlights plural interpretations of a text as instances where the meaning of central concepts, such as subjectivity or identity, are contested. Objections to New Criticism were not only raised on political grounds but also concerned its reductive understanding of language. For all its interest in rhetorical devices expressing contradiction, New
Criticism adhered to the belief that it was possible to exert control over linguistic meaning and that paradoxical statements made in literature had the special virtue of awaiting a sufficiently sophisticated mind to explain and resolve them.
