Showing posts with label New Criticism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New Criticism. Show all posts

00123--Write a note on New Criticism.



            During the nineteen-thirties there emerged in America a group of critics who came to be known as the founders of the so-called New criticism.  Its pioneer was John Crowe Ransome.  Other critics who belonged to this new concept in literary criticism were Robert Graves, William Empson, Kenneth Burke, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren.  George Watson says:  "In the American New Critics, contempt for late nineteenth-century values is general, not only for historical criticism and its accompanying pedantries, but for agnostic enlightenment, democratic optimism, industrialism, ands such international \ideals and Marxism.  It is a frankly reactionary movement, and the word 'New' must always have held for it an air of pleasing paradox".  In the late nineteen-thirties a general attack on historical criticism was fiercely mounted.  The New Critics condemned poetry for its use for any other purpose beyond itself.  It should not be studied for any other purpose whether historical or moralistic.  These critics declared that if poetry is worth reading at all, it is worth reading as poetry only, not for any purpose beyond it.

            The detailed explanation of the basic doctrines of the New Criticism appeared as late as 1946-49 in two articles published in then 'Sewanee Review' by W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley.  The articles were entitled "The International Fallacy' and "The Affective Fallacy".  Two of the assumptions of romantic criticism are held up to the light in these articles and pronounced fallacious:  "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".  Their slogan was 'Poetry for poetry only, and not another thing'.  However, some of the New Critics were a little tolerant too.  They said:  "We must accord to critics the right of the free choice as between different basic methods". 

00097--What is 'New Criticism'?



            The Expression 'new criticism' was first used in 1910 by Spingarn, a professor of the University of Columbia.  Different critics, whether of England or of America, evolved new metaphors, which went a long way in strengthening the movement of the new criticism.  T.S. Eliot's popular critical idiom is objective correlative, which is the external equivalent of the emotion of the poet.  Richards is known for his distinction between 'referential' and "emotive" meanings.
            The New Critics at the earlier phase were sharply divided into two groups - the realists and iconoclasts, and the aesthetic rebels.  The realists included Brooks, Bourne, Mencken, Lewis Mumfor, Max Eastmam etc.  The aesthetic rebels, were George Santayana, Lewis Gates, Haneker, and last but not the least J.E. Spingarn.  They were directly influenced by T.S. Elliot and Ezra Pound.
            The influence of Richards on the New Criticism is great.  But no less great is the influence of T.S. Eliot.  Eliot did not set much store by interpretation.  To him comparison, analysis, and elucidation were of supreme importance.  "Any book", says Eliot, "any essay, any note.....which produces a fact even of the lowest order about work of art is a better piece of work than nine-tenths of the most pretentious journalism".
            F.R. Lewis started a literary journal, named The Secretary, in which the scrutinisers proceeded by "a minute and brilliant examination - by a scrutiny-of actual passages".  "No treatment of poetry", he says in the introduction to Revaluation, is worth much that does not keep very close to the concrete: there lies the problem of method...."
            The new critics, with hardly any exception, confined themselves to the exploration of the artist's craftsmanship.  They wanted to rescue art from moralism and academic systems, conventions and abstract dogma.  "Systems become tyrannies overnight".  The New criticism is a challenge to Romanticism, which is an expression of personality and unbridled imagination.
            The New Criticism has been in vogue for the last four decades, and its influence has never been on the wane.  

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