Literary Criticism: New Criticism NC dominated lit theory "one of most important English-speaking contributions to lit. crit. analysis. Of course, also most impt in creating acanon made up of dead white men and perpetuating a patriarchal system in criticism--which most of us are not aware of until someone points itout! John Crowe Ransom: The New Criticism 1941(coined phrase) part of The Fugitives (Vanderbilt) or the Agrarians (Southern conservatives--political, religious, social) Allen Tate's I Take My Stand Ontological critic--a poem is a concrete entity, " a poem can be analyzed to discover its true or correct meaning independent of its author'sintention or emotional state, or the values and beliefs of either its author or its reader; it is autotelic--no end beyond its own existence "text and text only" Archibald MacLeish--"A poem should not mean/ But be" Other names for school: Modernism, formalism, aesthetic criticism, textual criticism History: In 19th century--from Romantics who looked at the author, to Historical and biographical criticism--esp mid-century withevolutionary theory and the idea of progress or growth (almost back to the Enlightenment ideal about things going toward perfection H.Spencer: from incoherent homogeneity to coherent heterogeneity and H Taine: influence of race, environment, and epoch) to impressionistic atthe end of century--how something affects the author to give him an individual vision which he then reports truthfully and honestly--inAmerica another form of Romantic Individualist [note this impressive school willsound like reader response from the other end] to expressiveschool--the author's experiences evidenced in text to naturalism which often has to do with materialistic determinism--sees the sensational in theeveryday life, sees violence and passion, reports in detail, deals with the lower classes of society Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren Understanding Poetry (1938)--textual analysis T. S. Eliot--Function of Criticism--objective correlative--poem does not reflect personality but only impersonal feelings and emotions; good/badreaders, good/bad poems, good/bad critics I. A. Richards Practical Criticism--if a student interprets differently--must be wrong; coined and practiced "close reading" of text--minutescrutiny of all facets William Empson--Seven Types of Ambiguity Wimsatt and Beardsley--Verbal Icon (1954)-- gave vocab of intentional fallacy, affective fallacy, and heresy of paraphrase F. R. Leavis Common Pursuit (1952)--not a theory, but a judgment (that's what causes the elitism) about what the great works of literature arebased on a close reading analysis--what they contain in terms of "difficulty" such as irony, paradoxes, ambiguities, etc. Many believe that this theory works best for genre of poetry and does not translate well to narrative or drama Assumptions: 1) aesthetic experience that can lead to truth, involving use of imagination and intuition, discernible only through lit 2) poem hasontological status--self-contained, autonomous entity 3) objective theory of art----poem not equated with author's feelings 4) intentionalfallacy--thinking meaning is nothing more than an expresion of the private experiences or intentions of the author***every poem must be apublic text 4) catalyst--the poet's mind brings together the experiences into an external object and a new creation**Eliot's objective correlative5)etymology of word is important in order to know meaning in time period 6) Affective fallacy--reader's response--confuses poem's meaningwith poem's effect on reader--the reader's response 7) poem's structure operates by complex series of laws 8) organic unity of poem--allparts--form and content--interrelated and interconnected--its truth and beauty inseparable 8) heresy of paraphrase--poem can never be the sameas a simple paraphrase of poem because structure (form) affects meaning Methodology: 1) tensions and conflicts which are resolved into harmonious whole --ambiguities 2) denotation and connotation 3) paradox andirony 4) figures of speech 5) literal and figurative language 6) tone 7) theme 8)