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New Criticism

New Criticism was a dominant trend in English and American literary criticism

of the mid twentieth century, from the 1920s to the early 1960s. Its adherents were

emphatic in their advocacy of close reading and attention to texts themselves, and

their rejection of criticism based on extra-textual sources, especially biography of

authors or texts being analyzed.

History

New Criticism is a type of formalist literary criticism that developed in the

1920s-30s and peaked in the 1940s-50s. The movement is named after John

Crowe Ransom's 1941 book The New Criticism. New Critics treat a work of

literature as if it were self-contained. They do not consider the reader's response,

author's intention, or historical and cultural contexts. New Critics perform a close

reading of the text, and believe the structure and meaning of the text should not

be examined separately. New Critics especially appreciate the use of literary

devices in a text. The New Criticism has sometimes been called an objective

approach to literature. [citation needed]

The notion of ambiguity is an important concept within New Criticism; several

prominent New Critics have been enamored above all else with the way that a text

can display multiple simultaneous meanings. In the 1930s, I. A. Richards borrowed

Sigmund Freud's term "overdetermination" (which Louis Althusser would later

revive in Marxist political theory) to refer to the multiple meanings which he

believed were always simultaneously present in language. To Richards, claiming

that a work has "One And Only One True Meaning" is an act of superstition (The

Philosophy of Rhetoric, 39).

In 1954, William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley published an essay entitled

"The intentional fallacy", in which they argued strongly against any discussion of

an author's intention, or "intended meaning." For Wimsatt and Beardsley, the

words on the page were all that mattered; importation of meanings from outside

the text was quite irrelevant, and potentially distracting. This became a central

tenet of the second generation of New Criticism.

On the other side of the page, so to speak, Wimsatt proposed an "affective

fallacy", discounting the reader's peculiar reaction (or violence of reaction) as a

valid measure of a text ("what it is" vs. "what it does"). This has wide-ranging

implications, going back to the catharsis and cathexis of the Ancient Greeks, but

also serves to exclude trivial but deeply affective advertisements and propaganda

from the artistic canon.

Taken together, these fallacies might compel one to refer to a text and its

functioning as an autonomous entity, intimate with but independent of both

author and reader. This reflects the earlier attitude of Russian formalism and its

attempt to describe poetry in mechanistic and then organic terms. (Both schools

of thought might be said to anticipate the 21st century interest in electronic

artificial intelligence, and perhaps lead researchers in that field to underestimate

the difficulty of that undertaking.)

Studying a passage of prose or poetry in New Critical style requires careful,

exacting scrutiny of the passage itself. Formal elements such as rhyme, meter,

setting, characterization, and plot were used to identify the theme of the text. In

addition to the theme, the New Critics also looked for paradox, ambiguity, irony,

and tension to help establish the single best interpretation of the text. Such an

approach may be criticized as constituting a conservative attempt to isolate the

text as a solid, immutable entity, shielded from any external influences such as

those of race, class, and gender. On the other hand, the New Critical emphasis on

irony and the search for contradiction and tension in language so central to New

Criticism may suggest the politics of suspicion and mistrust of authority, one that

persisted throughout the cold war years within New Criticism's popularity.

The Southern Agrarians, for instance, enfolded New Criticism's emphasis on

irony into their anti-authoritarianism and criticism of the emerging culture of

spending, consumption, and progress but — in the view of such writers as Robert

Penn Warren — authoritarian populism early in the 20th century. Perhaps because

of its usefulness as an unassuming but concise tool of political critique, New

Criticism persisted through the Cold War years and immanent reading or close

reading is now a fundamental tool of literary criticism, even underpinning

poststructuralism with its associated radical criticisms of political culture. New

Critical reading places great emphasis on the particular over the general, paying

close attention to individual words, syntax, and the order in which sentences and

ideas unfold as they are read. They look at, for example, imagery, metaphor,

rhythm, meter, etc.

Besides the names mentioned above, other prominent New Critical figures

include the following:

F. R. Leavis

William Empson

Robert Penn Warren

Cleanth Brooks

T. S. Eliot

R. P. Blackmur

Not all the thoughts and works stemming from these individuals fall within the

New Critical camp. For example, Eliot’s relationship with New Criticism was rather

complicated. In 1956, he claimed that he failed to see any school of criticism which

can be said to derive from himself, referring to the New Criticism as “the

lemon-squeezer school of criticism." He never understood the ways that the New

Critics had come to interpret The Waste Land, noting in "Thoughts after Lambeth"

(1931), "When I wrote a poem called The Waste Land some of the more approving

critics said that I had expressed the ‘disillusionment of a generation,’ which is

nonsense. I may have expressed for them their own illusion of being disillusioned,

but that did not form part of my intention." Of course, Eliot's commentary would

be largely irrelevant to a New Critic's close reading of his work. (Furthermore —

and in the first place — New Criticism ought to take a dim view of socio-historic

contextualization embodied in phrases like "disillusionment of a generation".)

Empson, too, attempted to distance himself from the New Criticism, and was

particularly critical of Wimsatt. His last book, Using Biography, was largely an

attempt to refute the doctrine of the "intentional fallacy".

Works

Eliot's essays, such as "Tradition and the Individual Talent", provide some of

the foundational texts for New Criticism, although Eliot himself had a more

ambiguous relationship with the school, as evidenced in later works such as The

Frontiers of Criticism.

Ransom's 1941 essay "The New Criticism," from which the movement received

its name. (Note that this essay was not the first work published that can be

identified as existing within the field of "New Criticism" — rather, it was the article

that gave the movement, including earlier documents, its current identity.)

Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity and Some Versions of Pastoral are among

the preeminent New Critical works. Their broad taxonomic ambition, in both cases,

ranges over a good portion of the literary canon in an attempt to define a literary

device or trope.

Richards's Practical Criticism is one of the most "theoretical" works of the New

Criticism; that is, it is a reflection on critical method.

Wimsatt and Beardsley concisely defined the two anathemas of the New

Criticism in their well-known essays "The Intentional Fallacy" and "The Affective

Fallacy."

Brooks's The Well-Wrought Urn is among the best-known examples of New

Critical poetry explication, the essay "The Heresy of Paraphrase" frequently cited

for its discussion of paradox in literature.

Criticism

One of the most common grievances, iterated in numerous ways, is an

objection to the idea of the text as autonomous; detractors react against a

perceived anti-historicism, accusing the New Critics of divorcing literature from its

place in history by emphasizing the text as autonomous. New Criticism is

frequently seen as “uninterested in the human meaning, the social function and

effect of literature” and as “unhistorical,” for “it isolates the work of art from its

past and its context.”[1] To the same ends, Terry Eagleton takes issue with the

attention paid by New Criticism “to the ‘words on the page,’ rather than to the

contexts which produced and surrounded them.”[2]

The New York Intellectuals was a contemporary intellectual movement who

emphasized instead the socio-political role of texts, in contrast to New Critics.

Robert Scholes argues that the New Critics fail, unlike the formalists, to work

on identifying the criteria of the prosaic and poetic rather than specific instances

of prose or poems; that they emphasize the works over the idea of textuality.[2]

Similarly, Northrop Frye argues that the study of literature should focus on literary

and mythological systems, rather than individual texts.[2]

Another common critique of the New Criticism is how ill-adapted the method

is to certain types of writing. Russell Reising, for example, argues that the New

Criticism devalues literature that is representational or realist.[2] Likewise, Scholes

accuses the methodology as denying any text of "cognitive quality" - that is,

"denying that literature can offer any form of knowledge."[2]

Jonathan Culler’s argument illustrates a shift to a critique of the interpretive

process itself. Culler writes that close reading fails not only to analyze the literary

system, but in so doing, it regards reading as “natural and unproblematic.”[2] In

the same vein, critic Terence Hawkes writes that the fundamental close reading

technique is based on the assumption that “the subject and the object of

study—the reader and the text—are stable and independent forms, rather than

products of the unconscious process of signification, an assumption which he

identifies as the "ideology of liberal humanism,” which is attributed to the New

Critics who are “accused of attempting to disguise the interests at work in their

critical processes.”[2] For Hawkes, ideally, a critic ought to be considered to

“[create] the finished work by his reading of it, and [not to] remain simply an inert

consumer of a ‘ready-made’ product.”[2]

Yet another objection to the New Criticism is that it is thought to aim at

making criticism scientific, or at least “bringing literary study to a condition

rivaling that of science.”[1] This charge may go hand in hand with another, in

which “the New Criticism is being dismissed as a mere pedagogical device, a

version of the French explication de texte, useful at most for American college

students who must learn to read and to read poetry in particular.”[1]

新批评派

百科名片

新批评派（The New Criticism），20世纪20至50年代英美批评界影响较大的一支

批评流派， 得名于美国约·兰塞姆所著论文集 《新批评》(1941)。这部文集赞扬托·斯·艾

略特等人的批评见解和以文字分析为主的批评方法，称之为“新批评”，以别于19世纪

以来学院派的传统的批评。

目录

产生背景

历史发展

代表人物和流派

产生背景

20世纪初英国作家休姆和美国作家庞德所提出的强调准确的意象和语言艺术的主张

是新批评派理论的开端。20年代艾略特和理查兹分别以象征主义的诗歌主张和文字分析的

批评方法奠定了新批评派的基本理论，而成为它的主要代表人物。新批评派成员众多，主

张庞杂，他们的共同倾向主要是：1.他们从象征派的美学观点出发，把作品看成独立的、

客观的象征物，是与外界绝缘的自给自足的有机体，称为“有机形式主义”；2.他们认为

文学在本质上是一种特殊的语言形式，批评的任务是对作品的文字进行分析，探究各个部

分之间的相互作用和隐秘的关系，称为“字义分析”。象征主义为他们提供了美学理论，

字义分析是他们进行评论的具体方法。

艾略特的著名论文《传统与个人才能》(1917)从反对浪漫主义的角度提出“非人格化”

的学说。针对浪漫主义者关于诗歌是诗人感情的表现的观点，他认为主观的感受只是素材，

要想进入作品，必先经过一道非人格化的、将个人情绪转变为普遍性、艺术性情绪的过程，

将经验转化为艺术的过程。针对浪漫派直接抒情的表现手法，艾略特在《哈姆雷特》（1919）

一文中认为“在艺术形式中唯一表现情绪的途径是寻找‘客观对应物’”，即“一套事物，

一种形势，一串事件，它们是你想表现的那种特殊情绪的公式”；“只要这类东西一出现……

那种情绪也就引发了”。这正是象征主义以特定事物来暗示情思的创作方法，对新批评家

注重发掘文字中所暗示和含混不清的东西很有影响。

历史发展

理查兹关于诗歌语言是一种特殊的、不反映客观真实的情绪性语言（《科学与诗》，

1925），以及诗歌文字因受上下文的影响而具有复杂的意义（《实用批评》，1929）等见解，

促使新批评派强调文字分析和诗歌含义的丰富性、复杂性。

30、40年代的新批评派发展了关于诗歌语言的理论和具体作品的分析。燕卜荪的成名

作《晦涩的七种类型》(1930)认为字义越含混就越丰富，诗的价值就越高。兰塞姆在《新

批评》中认为诗歌语言具有“骨架”（指主题思想或诗篇的逻辑）和“肌理”（指从文字

到标点的艺术处理）相冲突的特点。布鲁克斯在《嘲弄──一种结构原则》(1951)中把诗篇

上下文对于一个陈述语的修正称为“嘲弄”，说它是任何诗篇结构的主要原则。泰特在《论

诗的张力》(1938)中把诗篇的意义规定为文字的“内含”（指比喻意义）和“外延”(指逻

辑意义)所形成的“张力”，张力最后获得平衡或调和，诗篇才算成功。

代表人物和流派

在具体作品的评论上，新批评派推崇象征派和玄学派，贬低弥尔顿、拜伦和雪莱等诗

人。他们的理论和活动为现代派诗歌开辟了道路。