new criticism research papers

The Philosophical Self-Consciousness of the New Criticism and Formalism

• First Online: 24 June 2023

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• Wayne Deakin 2  

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This chapter brings into focus the trends of new criticism and formalism, whilst aligning their “formal” nature with a larger quest for formal definition , in the humanities in general, based upon the formal nature of the modern sciences. It outlines the formalist and quantitative nature of formalism and the new criticism, whilst comparing their development to new developments in philosophy for the humanities; namely, the new analytical philosophy pioneered by Russell and Frege. The self-consciousness comes from the notion that these various disciplines had become philosophically self-conscious in their search for rigorous certainty and objectivity. It then flags the issues that these ran into; for example, analytic philosophy ran into the wall of Russell’s Set Theory (Barber Shop) paradox. Therefore, it argues that these theories never quite managed to supersede the Idealism on the one hand, and Expressive Romanticism on the other, that they were attempting to transcend. Analytic philosophy (and on the Continent, transcendental phenomenology) gave way to ordinary language philosophy and speech act theory, while literary criticism opened-up massively in the wake of formalism and the new criticism, ushering in all types of theory, both subjective, objective and linguistic.

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The Lectures on Fine Art in Two Volumes was published in Hegel’s name but was in actual fact collated from the lecture notes of one of his erstwhile students, named Hotho—Hegel died in 1831 so the volumes were published posthumously. Hotho must have been a model student; both punctual and attentive. The two combined volumes run to well over 1500 pages.

Tieck, Wackenroder, Novalis, Hülsen and Hölderlin, along with the Schlegel brothers, constituted a large part of the German romantics ( Frühromantik ) and wrote in aesthetics journals such as The Athenaeum , The Lyceum and Pollen . See the stellar (pun intended) work of ‘constellation philosophy’ and in particular the work of Manfred Frank, for insightful research into the theory and philosophy of these thinkers. J.V. Goethe had written some undeniably romantic poetry and the tragic novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). He was also a key player in the Sturm und Drang theatrical movement but after his trip to Italy and the resultant travelogue, Italian Journey (1786–88) changed his aesthetic and philosophical position to that of a classicist. He even famously stated “Romanticism is a sickness” and was very critical of much of the German romantic movement and novels such as Friedrich Schlegel’s experimental romantic novel, Lucinde (1799).

Keats had coined the phrase “the egotistical sublime” for Wordsworth’s particular form of sublime encounter because of its subjective and biographical mediation through the persona of the poet himself. In his second (and very successful) and very satirical book of poetry, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809) Lord Byron had ridiculed the ‘Lake School’ of Southey, Coleridge and Wordsworth. P.B. Shelley also wrote the satirical “Peter Bell the Third” about Wordsworth and many of the younger romantics accused him of apostasy after his epic The Excursion (1814) and his latter “Thanksgiving Ode” (1816), which celebrated the defeat of Napoleon. An excellent New Historicist study has recently been made about this latter period in Wordsworth’s oeuvre by Jeffrey N. Cox, William Wordsworth , Second Generation Romantic: Contesting Poetry after Waterloo , Cambridge: CUP, 2021.

Bertrand Russell, the founding father of the analytic tradition in philosophy, had been originally trained in Hegelianism and later turned against this absolute Idealism in favour of the logical, mathematical and analytical approach of matching the logic of sentence structures to mathematics and thus deciphering a language of pure logic through which to underpin our sentences about the empirical world. This was held in sharp relief by Russell to both Romanticism and German Idealism. His (in) famous History of Western Philosophy (1945) was clearly also informed by the political climate at the time of the Second World War, although the roots of his animus also clearly lie in his apostasy with regards Hegelianism. The major irony of Russell’s Principles of Mathematics project is that it was actually very Hegelian in design; just as Hegel’s The Science of Logic (1812–1816) was designed as a foundational text for the sciences and in fact, all forms of knowledge enquiry in general, so Russell’s text was putatively designed to form a bedrock and axiomatic propositional logic to underpin all future inquiry. A further and (as far as I’m currently aware) unacknowledged irony is that the ‘barber shop paradox’ as it later came to be known, would have been sublated-through-negation in the jargon of the Hegelian system of logic. This option due to the mathematical system of sets was simply not available to Frege or Russell.

This foundational “glitch” in the Frege/Russell project once again demonstrated the impossibility of absolute grounds for axiomatic philosophical claims—and by extension and within the precis of this book, in any form of literary analysis within the remit of the humanities. Russell’s paradox basically runs like this: First of all in order to bring pure mathematics into the reified world of sentential objects and structures, one had to reduce the pure notations of abstract mathematics to classes; which produced and necessitated Set Theory. Therefore, for any particular collection of objects you name there will be a set . For example, three bottles, the people in the room, your family. The sets themselves become objects, thus, there are higher level sets that have sets as members; the set that has one member and the set that has three spoons. And we therefore identify numbers with sets. So, three will be defined as a set.

Then there will be a set whose members are themselves sets (as objects). The higher-level set three will have the set with the three people, the three black cats and the three teachers. However, the set of things not identical with itself-the null set-doesn’t exist but it is still by necessity and definition a set . The logical theory goes that by using these sets with no connection to an abstract notion of numbers we can explain maths by logical concepts.

The paradox: is that some classes are members of themselves—and there are some that are not members of themselves. A class is a member of the class of classes ( all classes ) What about a class whose members are not the same as themselves. A class of classes who aren’t members of themselves. The puzzle shows that an apparently plausible scenario is logically impossible. In the paradox, the barber is the “one who shaves all those, and those only, who do not shave themselves”. The question is, does the barber shave himself?

In answering this question, we instantiate a contradiction. The barber cannot shave himself as he only shaves those who do not shave themselves. Thus, if he shaves himself he ceases to be the barber. Conversely, if the barber does not shave himself, then he fits into the group of people who would be shaved by the barber, and thus, as the barber, he must shave himself . Later, and in a much more half-hearted effort at his mathematical principles, Russell went on to attempt to resolve this logical paradox with the theory of types .

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Deakin, W. (2023). The Philosophical Self-Consciousness of the New Criticism and Formalism. In: Modern Language, Philosophy and Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30494-1_3

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12 The New Criticism

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The New Criticism was extraordinarily influential from the end of the 1930s on into the 1950s. It is widely considered to have revolutionized the teaching of literature, to have helped in the definition of English Studies, and to have been a crucial starting-point for the development of critical theory in the second half of the twentieth century. However, it is in some respects an unusual critical theoretical movement. It is not dominated by any single critic, it has no manifesto, no clearly defined and agreed-upon starting-point, and there is no clear statement of its aims, provenance, and membership. The label that we have for it was first formally applied in 1941, in a book with that title by the American poet and critic John Crowe Ransom; yet Ransom’s book was as much about the need for a certain kind of critic as it was about identifying New Criticism. There is no typical ‘New Critic’. The critics whom Ransom examined in his 1941 book promptly rejected the label and dissociated themselves from what he was calling New Criticism, while the critics who are now usually designated New Critics were hardly mentioned by Ransom at all.

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10 Practicing New Criticism

Now that you’ve learned about New Criticism, practiced this method of analysis with “Ars Poetica,” and reviewed some examples, you will complete a theoretical response to a text using New Criticism as your approach. You will read three different texts below. Choose one text and respond to the questions in a short essay (500-750 words). I have included questions to guide your reading. You may choose to respond to some or all of these questions; however, your response should be written as a short essay, and you will need to come up with a thesis statement about your chosen text. Post your short essay as a response to the New Criticism Theoretical Response discussion board. I have included the theoretical response assignment instructions at the end of this chapter.

Checklist for New Criticism

Remember, when using the New Criticism approach, the goal is to closely examine the text itself and draw interpretations from its inherent literary qualities rather than relying on external context or authorial intent. Use “the speaker” instead of “the author” when writing about the text, and do not assume that the speaker is the author.

• Start with a close reading of the text. If you are working with a poem, number the lines. Then look for meter, rhythm, rhyme, stanzas, etc. (or identify whether the poem is free-verse)
• Try to identify the work’s oppositions, tensions, paradoxes, and ironies (complexities in the text).
• Look for evidence of unity in the work through specific elements including metaphor, point of view, diction, imagery, meter/rhyme, and structure.
• Once you have identified the text’s complexities and found evidence in its elements, create a thesis statement about how the poem’s various elements create unity. What is the the theme of the text, and how do the elements/complexities support that theme?

1. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot (1915)

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse A persona che mai tornasse al mondo, Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse. Ma percioche giammai di questo fondo Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero, Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin —

(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)

Beneath the music from a farther room.

               So how should I presume?

To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

               And how should I presume?

Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.

               And should I then presume?

               And how should I begin?

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,

And in short, I was afraid.

If one, settling a pillow by her head

               That is not it, at all.”

               That is not what I meant, at all.”

At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—

Almost, at times, the Fool.

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

Here are some New Criticism questions you can use to guide your response. You to do not have to use every question. You should formulate a thesis statement about the text and include this thesis statement in your response. Then support the thesis statement with evidence from the text.

• How does the poem’s use of imagery and symbolism contribute to the overall meaning of the poem? Explore specific instances of imagery and symbolism, such as the “yellow fog” or the “mermaids,” and discuss how they enhance the poem’s themes.
• Analyze the structure and form of the poem. How does the irregular rhyme scheme and meter influence the reader’s experience? How does Eliot’s use of enjambment and punctuation affect the pacing and interpretation of the text?
• Examine the diction and word choice in the poem. What impact do specific words and phrases have on the reader’s understanding of Prufrock’s character, his anxieties, and the sense of disillusionment conveyed in the poem?
• Explore the use of allusions and references. What are some examples of literary, historical, or cultural allusions in the poem? How do these allusions contribute to the poem’s meaning?
• Analyze the shifts in tone and mood throughout the poem. How do these shifts reflect the speaker’s changing emotions and the complexities of his self-perception? How does tone and mood contribute to the poem’s overall themes?
• Consider the role of time and temporality in the poem . How does the speaker’s preoccupation with time connect to the larger themes of regret, indecision, and mortality? How does the poem’s structure manipulate time?

2. The Parable of the Prodigal Son (c. 90 CE) King James Version

And he said, A certain man had two sons:

And the younger of them said to his father, Father, give me the portion of goods that falleth to me. And he divided unto them his living.

And not many days after the younger son gathered all together, and took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living.

And when he had spent all, there arose a mighty famine in that land; and he began to be in want.

And he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country; and he sent him into his fields to feed swine.

And he would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat: and no man gave unto him.

And when he came to himself, he said, How many hired servants of my father’s have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger!

I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee,

And am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants.

And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.

And the son said unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son.

But the father said to his servants, Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet:

And bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat, and be merry:

For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found. And they began to be merry.

Now his elder son was in the field: and as he came and drew nigh to the house, he heard musick and dancing.

And he called one of the servants, and asked what these things meant.

And he said unto him, Thy brother is come; and thy father hath killed the fatted calf, because he hath received him safe and sound.

And he was angry, and would not go in: therefore came his father out, and intreated him.

And he answering said to his father, Lo, these many years do I serve thee, neither transgressed I at any time thy commandment: and yet thou never gavest me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends:

But as soon as this thy son was come, which hath devoured thy living with harlots, thou hast killed for him the fatted calf.

And he said unto him, Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine.

It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.

The speaker in this text is Jesus, as reported in Luke’s Gospel. This passage is Jesus’s response to an accusation from the scribes and Pharisees that he “welcomes sinners” and even shares a table with them. The story seems to answer this accusation. How does knowing the context affect your reading of the parable? If you were raised and/or follow a Christian religious tradition, you may have extratextual interpretations for this parable. In your response, please try to set those aside. Remember that with New Criticism, the text itself is our focus, not the context or our outside knowledge of the text.

• Examine the parable’s structure and narrative sequence. How does the parable’s storytelling structure contribute to its impact? Consider the introduction, the conflict, the climax, and the resolution. How do these elements build tension and emotion?
• Analyze the characters’ personalities and development. How are the characters of the prodigal son, the father, and the older brother presented? How does their characterization contribute to the overall message of the parable?
• Explore the use of symbolism and metaphors. What symbolic elements in the parable contribute to its deeper meanings? How does the idea of the prodigal son’s journey and return symbolize themes like forgiveness, repentance, and redemption?
• Examine the parable’s language and diction. How does a phrase like “the fatted calf” affect the tone of this parable? What other examples of archaic diction contribute to the voice? What impact do specific words and phrases have on the parable’s meaning and emotional resonance?
• Analyze the use of repetition and rhetorical devices. How does the repetition of certain phrases or ideas contribute to the parable’s emphasis and rhythm? How do rhetorical techniques like parallelism or contrast enhance the storytelling?
• Discuss the use of irony in the parable. What examples of irony can you find? How do they contribute to the text’s meaning?

3. “Recuerdo” by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1922)

• Explore the poem’s title and its significance. How does the title “Recuerdo” (Spanish for “I remember”) set the tone for the poem? How does the title’s choice of language relate to the theme and content of the poem?
• Analyze the use of imagery and diction in the poem. What vivid images does the speaker use to describe the scene and events in the poem? How does the language style contribute to the poem’s atmosphere and themes? Are there any specific words or phrases that stand out as particularly significant? How does the poem explore the idea of remembering a past experience? What emotions and reflections does the speaker’s recollection evoke, and how are these emotions conveyed through the poem’s language and imagery?
• Examine the poem’s tone and mood. How does the tone shift throughout the poem, from the playful and carefree beginning to the reflective and contemplative ending?
• Analyze the poem’s structure and form. How do the poem’s rhyme and meter contribute to the work? Does the poem conform to a set genre (e.g., quatrain, sonnet, villanelle, etc.)? How does its use of or rejection of a specific genre contribute to the poem’s overall themes?
• Examine the use of punctuation. How does Millay’s use of  punctuation affect the rhythm and pacing of the poem? How does it impact the reader’s interpretation?
• Discuss the use of the second-person point of view. How does the poem’s use of “you” and “I” create a sense of intimacy and immediacy? How does this choice of point of view contribute to the poem’s unity?

Theoretical Response Assignment Instructions

Instructions.

• 15 points: theoretical response
• 10 points: online discussion (5 points per response) OR class attendance.

Critical Worlds Copyright © 2024 by Liza Long is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Uncategorized › The American New Critics

The American New Critics

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 17, 2016 • ( 1 )

American New Criticism, emerging in the 1920s and especially dominant in the 1940s and 1950s, is equivalent to the establishing of the new professional criticism in the emerging discipline of ‘English’ in British higher education during the inter-war period. As always, origins and explanations for its rise – in its heyday to almost hegemonic proportions – are complex and finally indefinite, but some suggestions may be sketched in. First, a number of the key figures were also part of a group called the Southern Agrarians, or ‘Fugitives’, a traditional, conservative, Southern-oriented movement which was hostile to the hard-nosed industrialism and materialism of a United States dominated by ‘the North’. Without stretching the point too far, a consanguinity with Arnold, Eliot and, later, Leavis in his  opposition to modern ‘inorganic’ civilization may be discerned here.

Second, New Criticism’s high point of influence was during the Second World War and the Cold War succeeding it, and we may see that its privileging of literary texts (their ‘order’, ‘harmony’ and ‘transcendence’ of the historically and ideologically determinate) and of the ‘impersonal’ analysis of what makes them great works of art (their innate value lying in their superiority to material history: see below Cleanth Brooks’s essay about Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’) might represent a haven for alienated intellectuals and, indeed, for whole generations of quietistic students. Third, with the huge expansion of the student population in the States in this period, catering for second-generation products of the American ‘melting pot’, New Criticism with its ‘practical criticism’ basis was at once pedagogically economical (copies of short texts could be distributed equally to everyone) and also a way of coping with masses of individuals who had no ‘history’ in common. In other words, its ahistorical, ‘neutral’ nature – the study only of ‘the words on the page’ – was an apparently equalizing, democratic activity appropriate to the new American experience.

But whatever the socio-cultural explanations for its provenance, New Criticism is clearly characterized in premise and practice: it is not concerned with context – historical, biographical, intellectual and so on; it is not interested in the ‘fallacies’ of ‘intention’ or ‘affect’; it is concerned solely with the ‘text in itself’, with its language and organization; it does not seek a text’s ‘meaning’, but how it ‘speaks itself’ (see Archibald MacLeish’s poem ‘Ars Poetica’, itself a synoptic New Critical document, which opens: ‘A poem must not mean/But be’); it is concerned to trace how the parts of the text relate, how it achieves its ‘order’ and ‘harmony’, how it contains and resolves ‘irony’, ‘paradox’, ‘tension’, ‘ambivalence’ and ‘ambiguity’; and it is concerned essentially with articulating the very ‘poem-ness’ – the formal quintessence – of the poem itself (and it usually is a poem – but see Mark Schorer and Wayne Booth, below).

An early, founding essay in the self-identification of New Criticism is John Crowe Ransom’s ‘Criticism, Inc.’ (1937). (His book on Eliot, Richards and others, entitled The New Criticism, 1941, gave the movement its name.) Ransom, one of the ‘Fugitives’ and editor of the Kenyon Review 1939–59, here lays down the ground rules: ‘Criticism, Inc.’ is the ‘business’ of professional – professors of literature in the universities in particular; criticism should become ‘more scientific, or precise and systematic’; students should ‘study literature, and not merely about literature’; Eliot was right to denounce romantic literature as ‘imperfect in objectivity, or “aesthetic distance”’; criticism is not ethical, linguistic or historical studies, which are merely ‘aids’; the critic should be able to exhibit not the ‘prose core’ to which a poem may be reduced but ‘the differentia, residue, or tissue, which keeps the object poetical or entire. The character of the poem resides for the good critic in its way of exhibiting the residuary quality.’

Many of these precepts are given practical application in the work of Cleanth Brooks, himself also a ‘Fugitive’, professional academic, editor of the Southern Review (with Robert Penn Warren) 1935–42, and one of the most skilled and exemplary practitioners of the New Criticism. His and Warren’s textbook anthologies, Understanding Poetry (1938) and Understanding Fiction (1943), are often regarded as having spread the New Critical doctrine throughout generations of American university literature students, but his most characteristic book of close readings is the significantly titled The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947), in which the essay on the eponymous urn of Keats’s Ode, ‘Keats’s Sylvan Historian: History Without Footnotes’ (1942), is in our view the best exemplification, explicitly and implicitly, of New Critical practice one could hope to find. Brooks at once quotes the opening of MacLeish’s ‘Ars Poetica’ (see above); refers to Eliot and his notion of the ‘objective correlative’; rejects the relevance of biography; reiterates throughout the terms ‘dramatic propriety’, ‘irony’, ‘paradox’ (repeatedly) and ‘organic context’; performs a bravura reading of the poem which leaves its ‘sententious’ final dictum as a dramatically organic element of the whole; constantly admires the poem’s ‘history’ above the ‘actual’ histories of ‘war and peace’, of ‘our time-ridden minds’, of ‘meaningless’ ‘accumulations of facts’, of ‘the scientific and philosophical generalisations which dominate our world’; explicitly praises the poem’s ‘insight into essential truth’; and confirms the poem’s value to us (in 1942, in the midst of the nightmare of wartime history) precisely because, like Keats’s urn, it is ‘All breathing human passion far above’ – thus stressing ‘the ironic fact that all human passion does leave one cloyed; hence the superiority of art’.

As New Criticism is, by definition, a praxis, much of its ‘theory’ occurs along the way in more specifically practical essays (as with Brooks above) and not as theoretical writing (see below, also, for Leavis’s refusal to theorize his position or engage in ‘philosophical’ extrapolation). But there are two New Critical essays in particular which are overtly theoretical and which have become influential texts more generally in modern critical discourse: ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ (1946) and ‘The Affective Fallacy’ (1949), written by W. K. Wimsatt – a professor of English at Yale University and author of the symptomatically titled book, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (1954) – in collaboration with Monroe C. Beardsley, a philosopher of aesthetics. Both essays, influenced by Eliot and Richards, engage with the ‘addresser’ (writer) –‘message’ (text) –‘addressee’ (reader) nexus outlined in the Introduction, in the pursuit of an ‘objective’ criticism which abjures both the personal input of the writer (‘intention’) and the emotional effect on the reader (‘affect’) in order purely to study the ‘words on the page’ and how the artefact ‘works’. The first essay argues that ‘the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art’; that a poem ‘goes about the world beyond [the author’s] power to intend about it or control it’ – it ‘belongs to the public’; that it should be understood in terms of the ‘dramatic speaker’ of the text, not the author; and be judged only by whether it ‘works’ or not.

Much critical debate has since raged about the place of intention in criticism, and continues to do so: Wimsatt and Beardsley’s position strikes a chord, for example, with poststructuralist notions of the ‘death of the author’ and with deconstruction’s freeing of the text from ‘presence’ and ‘meaning’. But there the resemblance ends, for the New Critics still basically insist that there is a determinate, ontologically stable ‘poem itself’, which is the ultimate arbiter of its own ‘statement’, and that an ‘objective’ criticism is possible. This runs quite counter to deconstruction’s notion of the ‘iterability’ of a text in its multiplex ‘positioned’ rereadings. This difference becomes very much clearer in the second essay, which argues that the ‘affective fallacy’ represents ‘a confusion between the poem and its results’: ‘trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological effects of the poem . . . ends in impressionism and relativism’.

Opposing the ‘classical objectivity’ of New Criticism to ‘romantic reader psychology’, it asserts that the outcome of both fallacies is that ‘the poem itself, as an object of specifically critical judgement, tends to disappear’. And the importance of a poem in classic New Critical terms is that by ‘fixing emotions and making them more permanently perceptible’, by the ‘survival’ of ‘its clear and nicely interrelated meanings, its completeness, balance, and tension’, it represents ‘the most precise emotive report on customs’: ‘In short, though cultures have changed, poems remain and explain.’ Poems, in other words, are our cultural heritage, permanent and valuable artefacts; and therein lies the crucial difference from more contemporary theoretical positions.

As we have noted, New Criticism focused principally on poetry, but two essays by Mark Schorer, ‘Technique as Discovery’ (1948) and ‘Fiction and the Analogical Matrix’ (1949), mark the attempt to deploy New Critical practice in relation to prose fiction. In the first of these, Schorer notes: ‘Modern criticism has shown us that to speak of content as such is not to speak of art at all, but of experience; and that it is only when we speak of the achieved content, the form, the work of art as a work of art, that we speak as critics. The difference between content, or experience, and achieved content, or art, is technique.’ This, he adds, has not been followed through in regard to the novel, whose own ‘technique’ is language, and whose own ‘achieved content’ – or ‘discovery’ of what it is saying – can only, as with a poem, be analysed in terms of that ‘technique’. In the second essay, Schorer extends his analysis of the language of fiction by revealing the unconscious patterns of imagery and symbolism (way beyond the author’s ‘intention’) present in all forms of fiction and not just those which foreground a ‘poetic’ discourse. He shows how the author’s ‘meaning’, often contradicting the surface sense, is embedded in the matrix of linguistic analogues which constitute the text. In this we may see connections with later poststructuralist theories’ concern with the sub-texts, ‘silences’, ‘ruptures’, ‘raptures’ and ‘play’ inherent in all texts, however seemingly stable – although Schorer himself, as a good New Critic, does not deconstruct modern novels, but reiterates the coherence of their ‘technique’ in seeking to capture ‘the whole of the modern consciousness . . . the complexity of the modern spirit’. Perhaps it is, rather, that we should sense an affinity between the American New Critic, Schorer, and the English moral formalist, F. R. Leavis , some of whose most famous criticism of fiction in the 1930s and beyond presents ‘the Novel as Dramatic Poem’.

Finally, we should notice another American ‘movement’ of the midtwentieth century which was especially influential in the study of fiction: the so-called ‘Chicago School’ of ‘Neo-Aristotelians’. Theoretically offering a challenge to the New Critics but in fact often seen as only a New Critical ‘heresy’ in their analysis of formal structure and in their belief, with T. S. Eliot, that criticism should study ‘poetry as poetry and not another thing’, the Neo-Aristotelians were centred, from the later 1930s through the 1940s and 1950s, on R. S. Crane at the University of Chicago. Establishing a theoretical basis derived principally from Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics, Crane and his group sought to emulate the logic, lucidity and scrupulous concern with evidence found there; were worried by the limitations of New Critical practice (its rejection of historical analysis, its tendency to present subjective judgements as though they were objective, its concern primarily with poetry); and attempted therefore to develop a more inclusive and catholic criticism which would cover all genres and draw for its techniques, on a ‘pluralistic and instrumentalist’ basis, from whatever method seemed appropriate to a particular case. The anthology Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern (1952; abridged edition with Preface by Crane, 1957) contains many examples of their approach, including Crane’s own exemplary reading of Fielding’s Tom Jones, ‘The Concept of Plot and the Plot of Tom Jones’.

In effect, the Neo-Aristotelians were most influential in the study of narrative structure in the novel, and most particularly by way of the work of a slightly later critic, Wayne C. Booth, who nevertheless acknowledged that he was a Chicago Aristotelian. His book The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) has been widely read and highly regarded, although latterly contemporary critical theory has demonstrated its limitations and inadequacies . Booth’s project was to examine ‘the art of communicating with readers – the rhetorical resources available to the writer of epic, novel or short story as he tries, consciously or unconsciously, to impose his fictional world upon the reader’. Although accepting in New Critical terms that a novel is an ‘autonomous’ text, Booth develops a key concept with the notion that it nevertheless contains an authorial ‘voice’ – the ‘implied author’ (his or her ‘official scribe’ or ‘second self’) – whom the reader invents by deduction from the attitudes articulated in the fiction. Once this distinction between author and the ‘authorial voice’ is made, the way is open to analyse, in and for themselves, the many and various forms of narration which construct the text. A major legacy of Booth’s is his separating out of ‘reliable’ and ‘unreliable’ narrators – the former, usually in the third person, coming close to the values of the ‘implied author’; the latter, often a character within the story, a deviant from them. What Booth did was at once to enhance the formal equipment available for analysis of the ‘rhetoric of fiction’ and, paradoxically perhaps, to promote the belief that authors do mean to ‘impose’ their values on the reader and that ‘reliability’ is therefore a good thing. We may see here a consonance with the ‘moral formalism’ of Leavis, and the reason why poststructuralist narratology has gone beyond Booth.

  New Criticism Essay

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FORMALISM (also known as NEW CRITICISM) A Basic Approach to Reading and Understanding Literature

Formalist theory has dominated the American literary scene for most of the twentieth century, and it has retained its great influence in many academic quarters. Its practitioners advocate methodical and systematic readings of texts. The major premises of New Criticism include: "art for art's sake," "content = form," and "texts exist in and for themselves." These premises lead to the development of reading strategies that isolate and objectify the overt structures of texts as well as authorial techniques and language usage. With these isolated and objective readings, New Criticism aims to classify, categorize, and catalog works according to their formal attributes. Along the way, New Criticism wants to pull out and discuss any universal truths that literary works might hold concerning the human condition. These truths are considered by New Critics to be static, enduring, and applicable to all humanity. Leading new critics include I.A. Richards, Cleanth Brooks, Northrop Frye, John Crowe Ransom, T.S. Eliot, and Roman Jacobsen. These thinkers consider literature to be a language game in which communication becomes semi-transparent. They reject Impressionism, moral tones, and philological studies, and believe that written works should work mostly on the intellect. The rise of New Criticism coincides with that of modern literature, probably because of the popularity of the "art for art's sake" maxim. Formalists value poetry rich in ambiguity, irony, and intention, and want to make literary criticism a science. This last projection introduces the concept of expert readers into interpretive theory. Current theorists tend to criticize Formalism for this and other symptoms of narrow-mindedness; still, they cannot deny that New Criticism has left a lasting impression on American literary scholarship. Its terminology continues as the basis for most literary education in the United States, and other critical approaches to reading and critiquing literature depend upon readers' familiarity with these terms to articulate their findings.

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