NEW CRITICISM

NET DEC-2008: Concept of paradox acc to Cleanth Brooks.

I A Richards’ concept of two uses of language.

NET June-2008: Hallmarks of new criticism.

Practical Criticism 

Practical criticism began in the 1920s with a series of experiments by the Cambridge critic I.A. Richards. He gave poems to students without any information about the author, period or explanatory commentary and asked students to respond to poems that were thus completely stripped of their context. In Practical Criticism (book) of 1929 he reported on and analyzed the results of his experiments. The objective of his work was to encourage students to concentrate on 'the words on the page', rather than relying on preconceived or received beliefs about a text. For Richards this form of close analysis of anonymous poems was ultimately intended to have psychological benefits for the students: by responding to all the currents of emotion and meaning in the poems and passages of prose which they read the students were to achieve what Richards called an 'organized response'. This meant that they would clarify the various currents of thought in the poem and achieve a corresponding clarification of their own emotions.

Practical criticism focuses on the text and text alone. Because of this exclusively textual orientation, it was an ideal programme for teasing out all the opposites- thought versus feeling, seriousness versus high spirits, resignation versus anger and so on, and for Richards,  these were reconciled  and transcended in poetry often through the use of irony. It spread the idea that the best poems created a vulnerable harmony out of conflicting perspectives and emotions. This view, later develops into New Criticism in the 1940s and 1950s in the United States and becomes a major mode of criticism there.

I A Richard’s concept of two uses of language 

The disjunction of art from matter-of-fact disciplines is central to Richardsian criticism. The tendency of many writers was to reject or to subordinate one to the other. Richards hoped to find some common area between science and art in psychology, some third term capable of relating one to the other. Principles of Literary Criticism represented the most concentrated endeavour to forge this relation. A more profitable approach proved to be his methodology of contexts.

In a chapter on ‘The Two uses of Language’, Richards distinguishes two kinds of causation that leads for ‘mental events’. The first kind is the result of stimuli affecting the mind through the senses immediately. The second kind of causation lies in the mind itself, its particular needs and its degree of relevant receptiveness. The interaction of these two kinds of of causation determines the character of the mental event.

In the scientific field, impulse should be exclusively derived from what is external.  The scientific use of language thus relies on reference undistorted by the receiving mind. By constrast, there is an emotive use of language which is designed not so much to promote references, as to arouse attitudes and emotions associated with them. The kind of ‘truth’ proper to science resides in the accuracy of references and the logicality of their interconnections. The kind of truth proper to fiction may reside in internal coherence rather than in correspondence with actual facts.

A number of questions in an interview conducted in 1968 draw Richards out on the origins of his and Ogden’s account of two uses of language, the emotive and the referential. In their formulation, referential meant the language of expository prose; it conveyed knowledge; economy and clarity of the relation of word (or sign) to referent (or object) were essential. If the question ‘Is this true or false in the ordinary strict scientific sense?’ were relevant, then the language was referential. Emotive language was not concerned with ‘knowledge’ in this sense (‘It tells us, or should tell us, nothing’ — this was one of the odd notes for many readers of The Meaning of Meaning [1923]). Emotive language was used to stimulate attitudes, certain states of awareness, interest and purpose. Besides these two uses, there is a further distinction into five functions which are present in varying degrees when language is used. 

Main features of New Criticism and how have they been challenged by later critics and theorists?

Introduction
New Criticism is an approach to literature which was developed by a group of American critics, most of who taught at southern universities during the years following the First World War. The New Critics wanted to avoid impressionistic criticism, which risked being shallow and arbitrary, and social/ historical approaches which might easily be subsumed by other disciplines. Thus, they attempted to systematize the study of literature, to develop an approach which was centered on the rigorous study of the text itself. They were given their name by John Crowe Ransom, who describes the new American formalists in The New Criticism (1941).
New Critical formalism
New Criticism is distinctly formalist in character. It stresses close attention to the internal characteristics of the text itself, and it discourages the use of external evidence to explain the work. The method of New Criticism is foremost a close reading, concentrating on such formal aspects as rhythm, meter, theme, imagery, metaphor, etc. The interpretation of a text shows that these aspects serve to support the structure of meaning within the text.
The aesthetic qualities praised by the New Critics were largely inherited from the critical writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge was the first to elaborate on a concept of the poem as a unified, organic whole which reconciled its internal conflicts and achieved some final balance or harmony.
In The Well-Wrought Urn (1947), Cleanth Brooks integrates these considerations into the New Critical approach. In interpreting canonical works of poetry, Brooks constantly analyzes the devices with which they set up opposing these and then resolve them. Through the use of "ironic contrast" and "ambivalence”, the poet is able to create internal paradoxes which are always resolved. Under close New Critical analysis, the poem is shown to be a hierarchical structure of meaning, of which one correct reading can be given.
The heresy of paraphrase
Although the New Critics do not assert that the meaning of a poem is inconsequential, they reject approaches which view the poem as an attempt at representing the "real world." They justify the avoidance of discussion of a poem's content through the doctrine of the "Heresy of Paraphrase," which is also described in The Well-Wrought Urn. Brooks asserts that the meaning of a poem is complex and precise, and that any attempt to paraphrase it inevitably distorts or reduces it. Thus, any attempt to say what a poem means is heretical, because it is an insult to the integrity of the complex structure of meaning within the work.
The intentional and affective fallacies
In The Verbal Icon (1954), William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley describe two other fallacies which are encountered in the study of literature.
The "Intentional Fallacy" is the mistake of attempting to understand the author's intentions when interpreting a literary work. Such an approach is fallacious because the meaning of a work should be contained solely within the work itself, and attempts to understand the author's intention violate the autonomy of the work.
The "Affective Fallacy" is the mistake of equating a work with its emotional effects upon an audience. The new critics believed that a text should not have to be understood relative to the responses of its readers; its merit (and meaning) must be inherent.
The New Critics' preference for poetry
The New Critics privileged poetry over other forms of literary expression because the saw the poem as the purest exemplification of the literary values which they upheld. However, the techniques of close reading and structural analysis of texts have also been applied to fiction, drama, and other literary forms. These techniques remain the dominant critical approach in many modern literature courses.
Possible critiques and responses
Because New Criticism is such a rigid and structured program for the study of literature, it is open to criticism on many fronts. First, in its insistence on excluding external evidence, New Criticism disqualifies many possibly fruitful perspectives for understanding texts, such as historicism, psychoanalysis, and Marxism. Since New Criticism aims at finding one "correct" reading, it also ignores the ambiguity of language and the active nature of the perception of meaning described by poststructuralists. Finally, it can even be perceived as elitist, because it excludes those readers who lack the background for arriving at the "correct" interpretation.
However, defenders of New Criticism might remind us that this approach is meant to deal with the poem on its own terms. While New Criticism may not offer us a wide range of perspectives on texts, it does attempt to deal with the text as a work of literary art and nothing else.

Ambiguity: Texts contain moments in which meaning is not clear, when interpretation is questioned. Seven Types of Ambiguity was first published in 1930 by William Empson. It was one of the most influential critical works of the 20th century and was a key foundation work in the formation of the New Criticism school. The book is organized around seven types of ambiguity that Empson finds in the poetry he criticises. Empson reads poetry as an exploration of conflicts within the author.

1.     The first type of ambiguity is the metaphor, that is, when two things are said to be alike which have different properties. This concept is similar to that of metaphysical conceit.

2.     Two or more meanings are resolved into one. Empson characterizes this as using two different metaphors at once.

3.     Two ideas that are connected through context can be given in one word simultaneously.

4.     Two or more meanings that do not agree but combine to make clear a complicated state of mind in the author.

5.     When the author discovers his idea in the act of writing. Empson describes a simile that lies halfway between two statements made by the author.

6.     When a statement says nothing and the readers are forced to invent a statement of their own, most likely in conflict with that of the author.

7.     Two words that within context are opposites that expose a fundamental division in the author's mind

Concept of paradox according to Cleanth Brooks 

Cleanth Brooks, an active member of the New Critical movement, outlines the use of reading poems through paradox as a method of critical interpretation. Paradox in poetry means that tension at the surface of a verse can lead to apparent contradictions and hypocrisies. His seminal essay, "The Language of Paradox," lays out Brooks' argument for the centrality of paradox by demonstrating that paradox is “the language appropriate and inevitable to poetry."The argument is based on the contention that referential language is too vague for the specific message a poet expresses; he must “make up his language as he goes." This, Brooks argues, is because words are mutable and meaning shifts when words are placed in relation to one another.

In the writing of poems, paradox is used as a method by which unlikely comparisons can be drawn and meaning can be extracted from poems both straightforward and enigmatic.

Brooks ends his essay with a reading of John Donne’s poem "The Canonization," which uses a paradox as its underlying metaphor. Using a charged religious term to describe the speaker’s physical love as saintly, Donne effectively argues that in rejecting the material world and withdrawing to a world of each other, the two lovers are appropriate candidates for canonization. This seems to parody both love and religion, but in fact it combines them, pairing unlikely circumstances and demonstrating their resulting complex meaning.