ABSTRACT
New Criticism sees literary artifacts as self-contained objects that should be analyzed apart from other contexts, such as biographical, historical, or psychological. Further, in a great literary artifact, form and content are inseparable, and its true meaning is contained in the interplay and unity of various literary devices. A New Critical approach examines an artifact through close reading, primarily explication—how meaning unfolds through its language—and analysis—the relationship among its parts. The critic pays particular attention to how tension, ambiguity, and irony are presented and ultimately resolved and unified by an artifact’s various literary devices. This chapter, in applying the close reading method to Jaime Hernandez’ comic short story, “Flies on the Ceiling” (1989), discusses comics’ visual devices (e.g., composition, layout, closure, etc.) in addition to focusing on those traditional elements addressed in New Critical analyses (e.g., imagery, diction, tone, point of view, structure, etc.). New Critics seek to discover an artifact’s meaning in terms of how it presents and resolves its central tension. In the case of “Flies on the Ceiling,” this discovery reveals the complexity and uniqueness of comics’ formal narrative elements.
