CULTURAL MATERIALISM

NET DEC-2008: What is cultural materialism?

Cultural Materialism established itself permanently in the field of literary studies in the mid 1980s. Some imp books in this field are

1.      Radical Tragedy: Jonathan Dollimore

2.      The Subject of Tragedy: Catherine Belsey

3.      Alternative Shakespeares

4.      Political Shakespeare: Alan Sinfield

Some major assumptions of cultural materialism: (common with New Historicism)

All subjects live and work within the culture constructed by ideology, through discourses. The ideological constructions in which the authors live and have internalized, inevitably become a part of their work, and therefore their works are always political and always vehicle of power. For example, a play by Shakespeare is related to the context of its production-to the economic and political system of the Elizabethan and Jacobean England, and to the particular institutions of cultural production, e.g. church, patronage, theatre, education etc.

Since lit plays an active role in the creation and consolidation of power, a literary text does not merely reflect the culture in which it is produced, but also actively contributes to the constitution of that culture. Cultural materialism tries to bring to light how ideology and thus existing social order tries to maintain itself through literature without losing its grip. Since the status of lit is not essentially different from other texts (political, economic, religious,), in the sense that it has no special access to the transcendent truth, it merits no special treatment, but is read alongside a wide variety of non literary texts.

Points of departure for cultural materialism

a)      Cultural materialists agree that at first sight, a literary text will seem supportive of the dominant/contemporary ideology, but they see that ideology as less pervasive than their contemporary new historicists. Cultural Materialists object to what they see as new historicism’s downplaying of subversion and dissent, and the dissent’s effectiveness.

b)      They follow Foucault in their interest in the insane, the criminal, the exploited and all those who over the course of history have been marginalized. More than that, CMs follow Raymond Williams in his adaptation of Gramsci’s view of hegemony. For Williams, the dominant culture is never the only player in the cultural field, although it is the most powerful. There are always residual and emergent strains within a culture that offer alternatives to hegemony. In other words, the dominant culture is always under pressure from alternative views and beliefs.

c)      So,  the analyses of lit texts by CMs bring to light how these texts while being the instruments of the dominant socio cultural order, also demonstrate how the apparent coherence of that order is threatened from the inside, by inner contradictions and by tensions that it seeks to hide.

d)     Focusing on the cracks in the ideological façade that texts offer, CM offers readings of dissidence that allow us to hear the socially marginalized and expose the cultural machinery that is responsible for their marginalization and exclusion.

e)      They are also interested in the way in which the traditional reception of such texts has obscured the presence and operation of such ideologies. Ex: Dollimore’s Radical Tragedy argues that traditional interpretations of Jacobean tragedies have ignored how these plays undermine humanist assumptions because they focus on what fits the humanist framework.

f)       CM sees such dissident readings of texts from the past as political interventions in the present, as political challenges to the conservative, humanistically oriented positions and critical practices that are very much evident among literary academics and among those that control educational institutions.

g)      It not only tries to offer alternative understandings of the past, but also tries to effectuate political change in the present from a broadly socialist, and even feminist point of view. As Dollimore and Sinfield say, CM is committed to the transformation of the social order which exploits people on grounds of race, gender and class.

h)      Where new historicists would be satisfied to bring to light hidden power relations in a cluster of Renaissance texts, Cultural materialists seek to find instances of dissidence, subversion and transgression that are relevant in the contemporary political struggles.

i)        As such, the CMs are interested in the way in which lit from the past, say Shakespeare has been made to function in the later periods  and in our contemporary culture. CMs for instance may ask, which plays we find within the university curricula, or which sonnets are standardly anthologised. In the performance of Shakespeare’s plays, they may question how is Shakespeare constructed and from what ideological position?

j)        In one of the essays collected in Political Shakespeare, Sinfield concludes that in education, Shakespeare has been made to speak for the right.

k)       As with Raymond Williams, for CMs ideology takes on a tangible, material form in institutions like the university, the museum, the army, the school, the labour union, the church and so on. And it becomes material in the way in which images from the past are deployed in the service of contemporary ideology.

NEW HISTORICISM

1.  NET –DEC- 2007 New historicism rejects the traditional distinction between the text and the context. Explain. 

New historicism points:

Generally the origin of NH is situated in 1980, when Stephen Greenblatt published his book Renaissance Self Fashioning. The constructedness of culture and its annexation by literary studies are two central points in New Historicism, which is American in origin. It brought to the traditional study of Renaissance, esp., the works of Shakespeare a mixture of Marxixt, and poststructuralist orientations, esp. poststructuralist notions of the self, of discourse and of power. It leans more towards a Foucauldian notion of power, the discourses that serve as vehicles of power, on the construction of identity and so on.

It rejects both the autonomy and individual genius of the author and the autonomy of the individual work and sees texts as absolutely inseparable from their historical context. The author’s role is to a large extent determined by historical circumstances. As prominent historicist critic Stephen Greenblatt said, the literary text is always part and parcel of a much wider cultural, political, social, and economic dispensation. 

The literary text is a time and place bound verbal construction and is in one way or other always political. Because it is inevitably involved with a discourse or an ideology it cannot help being a vehicle of power. As a consequence, literature, like any other text, not only reflects relations of power but actively participates in the consolidation and/ or construction of discourses and ideologies. It functions as an instrument in the construction of identities, not only at the individual level but also the group, or the national state. Literature is not simply a product of history, it also actively makes history. Culture according to NH is a construct and they are even willing to grant their own assumptions must also be constructed, and may therefore be deconstructed.

 In his book, ‘Renaissance Self- Fashioning’, Greenblatt says that in the 16^th century there appeared to be an increased self consciousness about the fashioning the human identity as a manipulable, artful process. An increased awareness of the ways in which the self can be fashioned leads to an increased awareness of how the self is subject to power relations and how it always functions within larger structures that may control such fashioning. This relates to the Poststructuralist notion that the self is always a construction, that our identity is never given, but always the product of an interaction between the way we want to represent ourselves (thru the stories we tell) and our actual  presentations, and the power relations we are part of.

So it can be said in the words of John Brannigan that NH is a mode of critical interpretation which privileges power relations as the most important context for all texts. Power works through discourses and like ideology gives the subject the impression that that to comply with its dictates is the most natural thing to do. The NH sees literature as involved in the making of history through its active participation in discursive practices. One example:  NH studies autobiography, travel lit, Shakespeare’s plays to examine how the representations of Queen Elizabeth I contribute to the cult of the ‘virgin queen’

NH also shows how power has worked to suppress or marginalize rival stories and discourses. A historical period is seen as a remote culture whose various manifestations – the texts of all kinds- need detailed study to so that power relations and forces operating in that culture may be brought to light. In this way New historicism rejects the traditional distinction between the text and the context.

NH seeks to read literary texts alongside or against other generally neglected contemporary documentary or imaginative texts (eg: to read Hamlet in terms of contemporary law on divorce and inheritance or records of suicide in young women)

Gist: This school, influenced by structuralist and post-structuralist theories, seeks to reconnect a work with the time period in which it was produced and identify it with the cultural and political movements of the time (Michel Foucault's concept of épistème). New Historicism assumes that every work is a product of the historic moment that created it. Specifically, New Historicism is "...a practice that has developed out of contemporary theory, particularly the structuralist realization that all human systems are symbolic and subject to the rules of language, and the deconstructive realization that there is no way of positioning oneself as an observer outside the closed circle of textuality" (Richter 1205).

A helpful way of considering New Historical theory, Tyson explains, is to think about the retelling of history itself: "...questions asked by traditional historians and by new historicists are quite different...traditional historians ask, 'What happened?' and 'What does the event tell us about history?' In contrast, new historicists ask, 'How has the event been interpreted?' and 'What do the interpretations tell us about the interpreters?'" (278). So New Historicism resists the notion that "...history is a series of events that have a linear, causal relationship: event A caused event B; event B caused event C; and so on" (Tyson 278).

New historicists do not believe that we can look at history objectively, but rather that we interpret events as products of our time and culture and that "...we don't have clear access to any but the most basic facts of history...our understanding of what such facts mean...is...strictly a matter of interpretation, not fact" (279). Moreover, New Historicism holds that we are hopelessly subjective interpreters of what we observe.

New Historicism (some more points)

New Historicism (sometimes referred to as Cultural Poetics) emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, largely in reaction to the lingering effects of New Criticism and its ahistorical approach. "New" Historicism's adjectival emphasis highlights its opposition to the old historical-biographical criticism prevalent before the advent of New Criticism. In the earlier historical-biographical criticism, literature was seen as a (mimetic) reflection of the historical world in which it was produced. Further, history was viewed as stable, linear, and recoverable--a narrative of fact. In contrast, New Historicism views history skeptically (historical narrative is inherently subjective), but also more broadly; history includes all of the cultural, social, political, anthropological discourses at work in any given age, and these various "texts" are unranked - any text may yield information valuable in understanding a particular milieu. Rather than forming a backdrop, the many discourses at work at any given time affect both an author and his/her text; both are inescapably part of a social construct. Stephen Greenblatt was an early important figure, and Michel Foucault's intertextual methods focusing especially on issues such as power and knowledge proved very influential. Other major figures include Clifford Geertz, Louis Montrose, Catherine Gallagher, Jonathan Dollimore, and Jerome McCann.

Key Terms:

Discourse - [from Wolfreys - see General Resources below] - "defined by Michel Foucault as language practice: that is, language as it is used by various constituencies (the law, medicine, the church, for example) for purposes to do with power relationships between people"

Episteme - [from Wolfreys - see General Resources below] - "Michel Foucault employs the idea of episteme to indicate a particular group of knowledges and discourses which operate in concert as the dominant discourses in any given historical period. He also identifies epistemic breaks, radical shifts in the varieties and deployments of knowledge for ideological purposes, which take place from period to period"

Power - [from Wolfreys - see General Resources below] - "in the work of Michel Foucault, power constitutes one of the three axes constitutive of subjectification, the other two being ethics and truth. For Foucault, power implies knowledge, even while knowledge is, concomitantly, constitutive of power: knowledge gives one power, but one has the power in given circumstances to constitute bodies of knowledge, discourses and so on as valid or invalid, truthful or untruthful. Power serves in making the world both knowable and controllable. Yet, in the nature of power, as Foucault suggests in the first volume of his History of Sexuality, is essentially proscriptive, concerned more with imposing limits on its subjects."

Self-positioning - [from Lois Tyson - see General Resources below] - "new historicism's claim that historical analysis is unavoidably subjective is not an attempt to legitimize a self-indulgent, 'anything goes' attitude toward the writing of history. Rather, the inevitability of personal bias makes it imperative that new historicists be aware of and as forthright as possible about their own psychological and ideological positions relative to the material they analyze so that their readers can have some idea of the human 'lens' through which they are viewing the historical issues at hand."

Thick description - a term developed by Clifford Geertz; [from Charles Bressler - see General Resources below]: a "term used to describe the seemingly insignificant details present in any cultural practice. By focusing on these details, one can then reveal the inherent contradictory forces at work within culture. "

Marxism

Marxism

NET question: Marxism and Structuralism in Althusser

Marxism is a sociological approach to literature that views works of literature or art as the products of historical forces that can be analyzed by looking at the material conditions in which they were formed. In Marxism, the base of a society, that is, the way in which its economy is organized determines its superstructure, which is everything related to culture, law, religion philosophy, art, literature etc.

In Marxist ideology, what we often classify as a world view (such as the Victorian age) is actually the articulations of the dominant class. Marxism generally focuses on the clash between the dominant and repressed classes in any given age. Major figures include Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, Raymond Williams, Louis Althusser, Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci, Georg Lukacs and Theordor Adorno, etc.

Althusser’s Ideology

The view that the base determines the cultural superstructure is not seen by all because there are forces at work that prevent us from seeing that, for instance the liberal humanist view that we are essentially free. It is here that ideology works and makes us experience life in a certain way and also at the same time makes us believe that that way of seeing the world is natural. The French Marxist philosopher says that ideology works through ideological state apparatuses, which although they may have their own sub-ideology are all subjected to the ruling ideology. Althusser’s ideological state apparatuses include organized religion, the law, the political system, the educational system, in short all the institutions through which we are socialized. So, everything is pervaded by ideology. And while we believe we are acting out of our free will, we are in reality ‘acted by the system’. Drawing on French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, Althusser says that the processes we go through when we grow up leave us forever incomplete. Aware of that deep lack and yearning for completion, we turn to ideology because it constantly ‘interpellates’ or addresses us as concrete subjects. It convinces us that we are whole and real and so we see what ideology makes us see, as belonging to the natural, harmonious order of things. Ideology makes us believe we are free agents and in that way makes us complicit in our own delusion.

Gramsci’s Hegemony

In Althusser, there is no room for autonomous or non ideological thought or action. However, with Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, a modified concept came into being, that of hegemony. Hegemony is the domination of a set of beliefs and values through ‘consent’ rather than through coercive force. Under hegemonic conditions the majority of a nation’s citizens has so effectively internalized what the rulers want them to believe that they genuinely think that they are voicing their own opinion. However, there is always room for dissent. American Marxist critic Raymond Williams emphasized this aspect and expressed his view that the base completely determines the superstructure is too simple. From William’s perspective, ideology, hegemony and counter-hegemonic tendencies struggle with each other in literature and culture that are constantly in motion. Cultural Materialists follow Raymond.

Marxist Literary Studies

Marxists differ on the extent to which the cultural superstructure is determined by the economic base. The so called ‘vulgar Marxists’ of the pre war period saw a direct cause effect relationship between the socio economic base and literature,  and saw the writer directly conditioned by his/her social class. Marxists are of the view that writers can never escape ideology and their social background so that the social reality of the writer will always be a part of the text.

Later in their readings of literary texts, they tried to see the text as independent of the author’s political views, however not separate the text from its social reality. This gave them a better picture of the real world of class conflicts and political tensions. This allowed Marxist critics to read the works of even the most reactionary writers against the grain of their political views, so that the bourgeois writers can also be appreciated from Marxist point of view. George Lukacs holds Balzac and Tolstoy in high regard, because it is only in their panoramic novels that the reader is confronted with the historical truth. The characters in their novels are to some extent independent of the author’s ideological convictions, and accurately reflect the historical reality.  These novels offer a total overview of all the social forces involved. For Marxists, such an approach which takes all parties and positions and their dynamic relationships into account and thereby allows a fuller understanding of the whole is dialectical.

Another important reading is derived from Pierre Macherey’s A Theory of Literary Production. For Macherey, literary works are pervaded by ideology. So in order to get beyond a text’s ideological dimension, the reader has to begin with the cracks in the facade, the sites where the text is not fully in control.  In order to expose the ideology of a text, the interpreters must focus on what the text does not say, on what the text represses rather than expresses. It is only in the gaps, silences that the unarticulated is found. Thus, literature reveals the gaps in ideology. The text might be almost said to have an unconscious to which it has consigned what it cannot say because of ideological repression. (effects of psychoanalysis). Macherey finds these gaps not in the dominant themes which are fully controlled by ideology, but in textual elements which are only tangentially related to the main theme/s.

Therefore it can be said that through the politics of the text –its ideological dimension, Marxist criticism addresses the politics of the outer world.

Dialectical materialism - "the theory that history develops neither in a random fashion nor in a linear one but instead as struggle between contradictions that ultimately find resolution in a synthesis of the two sides. For example, class conflicts lead to new social systems"

Material circumstances - "the economic conditions underlying the society. To understand social events, one must have a grasp of the material circumstances and the historical situation in which they occur"

Reflectionism - associated with Vulgar Marxism - "a theory that the superstructure of a society mirrors its economic base and, by extension, that a text reflects the society that produced it"

Superstructure - "The social, political, and ideological systems and institutions--for example, the values, art, and legal processes of a society--that are generated by the base" 

1.      Marxism and Structuralism in Althusser

Ans: In the 1960s, Marxist critic Louis Althusser assimilated structuralism into his theories on Marxism. He was of the view that the structure of society as a whole was formed by diverse social formations or ideological state apparatuses including religious, legal, political and literary institutions. Each of these apparatus is connected with the others in complex ways, but possesses a relative autonomy. The ideology of a particular institution is determined by the material base in the contemporary economic production. Althusser views ideology as a ‘false consciousness’. Because Althusser held that a person's desires, choices, intentions, preferences, judgements and so forth are the products of social practices, he believed it necessary to conceive of how society makes the individual in its own image. Within capitalist societies, the human individual is generally regarded as a subject endowed with the property of being a self-conscious 'responsible' agent, whose actions can be explained by his or her beliefs and thoughts. For Althusser, however, a person’s capacity for perceiving him-/herself in this way is not innate or "given". Rather, it is acquired within the structure of established social practices, which impose on individuals the role (forme) of a subject.[48] Social practices both determine the characteristics of the individual and give him/her an idea of the range of properties he/she can have, and of the limits of each individual. Althusser argues that many of our roles and activities are given to us by social practice. In Althusser’s view, our values, desires and preferences are inculcated in us by ideological practice, the sphere which has the defining property of constituting individuals as subjects.[49] Ideological practice consists of an assortment of institutions called Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs), which include the family, the media, religious organisations and, most importantly in capitalist societies, the education system, as well as the received ideas that they propagate. Despite its many institutional forms, the function and structure of ideology is unchanging and present throughout history;[51] as Althusser states, "ideology has no history".[52] All ideologies constitute a subject, even though he or she may differ according to each particular ideology. Memorably, Althusser illustrates this with the concept of "hailing" or "interpellation," which draws heavily from Lacan and his concept of the Mirror Stage.

Althusser advances two theses on ideology: I, "Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence";[61] II, "Ideology has a material existence".[62] The first thesis tenders the familiar Marxist contention that ideologies have the function of masking the exploitative arrangements on which class societies are based.

The second thesis posits that ideology does not exist in the form of "ideas" or conscious "representations" in the "minds" of individuals. Rather, ideology consists of the actions and behaviours of bodies governed by their disposition within material apparatuses. 

Structuralism: similar to Levi-Strauss’s anthropology in that the human being is acted upon by culture, he is not free. Althusser's theory of ideology draws on Marx and Gramsci, but also on Freud's and Lacan's concepts of the unconscious and mirror-phase respectively, and describes the structures and systems that enable the concept of the self. These structures, for Althusser, are both agents of repression and inevitable - it is impossible to escape ideology, to not be subjected to it.

On Psychoanalysis

1. 1.    Explain the significance of psychoanalysis in the interpretation of the literary text. In 300 words.

Ans: Psychoanalytic criticism is based on the premises and procedures established by Sigmund Freud. In this form of criticism, a literary work is viewed as a disguised form of libidinal wish-fulfillment of the author or of a character. Acc to this mode of criticism, a literary work is like a dream and consists of the imagined or fantasized fulfillment of wishes that are either denied by reality or are prohibited by social standards of morality. In the unconsciousness of the author, these desires, mainly libidinal or sexual desires come in conflict with the ‘censor’ (or the standards of society internalized by the individual) and are repressed by it. However, it is through literature that these desires find their expression, however, in a distorted form to disguise their real motives from the conscious mind. The conscious mind does this through the processes of concentration, displacement and symbolism. This is known as dream work. The critic analyzes the language and symbolism of such a text to reverse the process of the dream work and arrive at the underlying latent or hidden thoughts. Eg Hamlet and Oedipus. Although such criticism tends to be reductive, explaining away the ambiguities of works of literature by reference to established psychoanalytic doctrine, some other imp approaches developed from this. For example, the Jungian criticism with its mythocriticism and archetype analysis. Then, Lacan’s theories which apply Freud and Saussure, and says that the unconscious is structured like a language. Among modern critical uses of psychoanalysis is the development of "ego psychology" in the work of Norman Holland, who concentrates on the relations between reader and text - as with reader response criticism. 'Holland's experiments in reader response theory suggest that we all read literature selectively, unconsciously projecting our own fantasies into it'. Like all forms of literary criticism, psychoanalytic criticism can yield useful clues to the sometime baffling symbols, actions, and settings in a literary work.

Formalism

NET questions: What is formalism? Explain with examples. / What is Russian formalism?
 

The Formalist movement appeared in the Soviet Union in the 1910s and 1920s. Its leading theorists were Victor Shklovsky, Eikenbaum, and Murakofsky. The movement’s attentions were deliberately focused on the formal specificity of literary works. Victor Shklovsky said that literature has the ability to make us see the world anew, to make that which has become familiar, strange again. The Formalists wanted to know how literature works and how it achieves its defamiliarization effects. They sought to define literature’s distinct ‘literariness’ and found this in the devices that distinguished literary from ordinary language. For example, poetry achieves defamiliarisation by employing devices like repetition, rhyme, meter, stanzas etc, which ordinary language does not use. What these devices have in common is that they always draw attention to themselves: they remind us that we are dealing with language and not the real world because they signal their own difference from the language that we use in the real world. Roman Jakobson said in 1921 that poetry is a form of language characterized by an orientation towards its own form. If a work of art draws attention to its own form, then that form becomes a part of its content: its form is part of what it communicates. Later, the Prague structuralists replaced defamiliarization with ‘foregrounding’. Jan Murakofsky, a Russian formalist said that poetic language is an effect of ‘foregrounding of utterance’.

 Unlike defamiliarization, which would not seem to affect its immediate textual environment, foregrounding has the effect that it ‘automizes’ neighboring textual elements. It draws the reader’s attention to itself and obscures whatever else may be going on beside it. While defamiliarisation points to a contrastive, but static relationship between the defamiliarising element and the other elements, foregrounding points to the dynamism of the relationship: what one element gains through foregrounding is lost by other elements that constitute its background. In other words, foregrounding sees the text as a structure of interrelated elements. (Foregrounding is structuralist in orientation)

A further enduring distinction introduced by formalism was in the field of narrative, between ‘syuzet’ and ‘fabula’. Vladimir Propp (not a formalist) developed on these ideas in his book ‘The Morphology of the Russian Folktale’. Here he tried to show how a hundred different tales are in fact variations or syuzhets of one and the same underlying formula or the fabula. He further illustrated how this structure works through ‘actants’ or ‘functions’ such as a helper in a tale.

Early Formalism looked at the study of literature as a ‘systematic science’, but there were still certain issues with its tenets. First, it saw a poem as a totality of its ‘devices’ that were not related in any way. Next, it assumed that the ‘literariness’ of literature was the product of the inherent qualities of those devices. These qualities and the resulting literariness can be pointed at. Moreover, the Formalists were interested in establishing general rules, and although one rule was that literariness is created by defamiliarising devices, it was impossible to establish rules with regard to these devices.

Later, it was brought out that defamiliarisation works by way of contrast, of ‘difference’. The way/s in which literary language differed from ordinary language was only one step to study how literature worked. They later brought out that the process of familiarization is responsible for our relative blindness with regard to our environment, including language at work within literature itself. Familiarization worked at two levels: that of a single literary work and that of literature as a whole. Next, the Formalists started looking for defamiliarization within literary works themselves. They showed through examples from poetry that whether a certain poetic technique serves as a defamiliarising device depends on the larger background. So, the ability to defamiliarize our perception is not a quality that a technique inherently possesses, it is in fact a a matter of how that technique ‘functions’ within a given literary work, and that function can change from text to text. What counts is that way and the extent to which it differs from its environment.

Every literary technique then, can have either a familiarizing or a defamiliarising effect. Everything depends on the way it functions within a given text. Differentiation is the crucial factor. This led to a view of the literary work as a system that establishes a textual environment that is again and again made new with the help of defamiliarising techniques.

It is not only the individual literary work that can be seen as a system, as a structure, in which everything is interrelated and interdependent, but literature as a whole can and should be seen in those terms. The individual texts that that together constitute ‘literature’ first of all position themselves with reference to other individual texts, to the genre to which they belong, and then to the whole corpus of texts that we call literature.

 Difference between new criticism and formalism

For the New critics, the formal aspects of literature were not unimportant because from their perspective, meaning was always bound up with form. They were interested in the form in which a poem presented itself, because a close scrutiny of its formal aspects would reveal the complex oppositions and tensions that constituted the poem’s real meaning. However, the formalist ignored literature’s referential function, the way it reflects the world in which we live, and gave it an autonomous status, in what Jakobson  called ‘literariness’. Literary language always draws attention to itself. Whereas practical criticism and new criticism concentrated on the individual meaning of texts, Formalist wanted to discover general laws that make literature work.

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.