Ulysses James Joyce

1
Lesson 5 American New Criticism and Its
Forerunners

• Introduction
• ? It is generally considered the major movement
  in American criticism this century, at least so
  far. It has two branches, so to speak (a)
  English Practical Criticism, led by I. A.
  Richards, and (b) American New Criticism proper.
• It should be noted that English culture
  powerfully attracted American new critics. T. S.
  Eliot himself, who is generally held as the
  remote initiator of this movement, was fascinated
  by English and European culture in general, and
  by the notion of European tradition, almost
  non-existent in the United States.
• ? Taking the English roots of this critical
  school, one can say that it began in England in
  the 1920s, continued in the United States in the
  1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, exerting a very strong
  influence until the late 1960s. By the 50s, one
  can say that its main doctrinal body was fully
  articulated.

2
Lesson 5 American New Criticism and Its
Forerunners

• New critical ideals were continued in succeeding
  critical schools (a) either by obvious affinity,
  as the close attention to texts of deconstructive
  criticism, bent on paradox, irony, and
  multisignificance (b) or by plain rejection. But
  it is impossible to understand contemporary
  Anglo-American criticims without reference to New
  Criticism.
• Its influence has been so strong because it not
  only comprised a theory of literature, but also a
  theory of the teaching of literature, which was
  adopted for decades and so it influenced the
  consideration of literature at all social and
  cultural levels, not only at the level of
  academics.

3
Lesson 5 American New Criticism and Its
Forerunners

• The intellectual basis of New Criticism
• It is generally claimed that American New
  Criticism is not a cohesive school. Some traits
  in common, however
• They all reacted against old, positivist,
  historical methods for approaching literature.
• At least in theory, they shared a preference for
  non-romantic, non-expressive, non-sentimental,
  non-personal poetry.
• Their critical methods were similar and
  specifically centred on the text, the words on
  the page, against contextual questions

4
Lesson 5 American New Criticism and Its
Forerunners

• Roots and membership of American New Criticism
• These roots were in England, and directly in I.
  A. Richards, who, in 1939, went to Harvard and
  established the link between England and the
  United States.
• Another non-American, non-English new critic was
  René Wellek, born in Vienna and educated in
  Czechoslovakia, went to England and then to the
  States and contributed an international dimension
  to a typically Anglo-American development.
• But New Criticism is doubtlessly an American
  development. It began in the South at Vanderbilt
  University in Tennessee mainly John Crowe
  Ranson, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren. But
  their literary conceptions and analytical
  methods were so flexible and transferable that
  they were soon echoed in the North by scholars
  such as Austin Warren, W. K. Wimsatt, and Cleanth
  Brooks.

5
Lesson 5 American New Criticism and Its
Forerunners

• Cultural, ideological, and political origins
• Ranson, Tate, and Warren were at the centre of
  two organizations that set the ideological bases
  of the New Criticism the Fugitive circle in the
  1920s and the Agrarian movement in the 1930s.
• The Fugitives were a Vanderbilt-based group
  established in 1915 they had a journal which
  published essays and poetry. The Fugitives
  favoured the reception of European modernism (T.
  S. Eliot) and attendant values (strongly
  conservative).
• The Fugitives later developed into the
  Agrarians, which, apart from a literary movement,
  also had a political agenda. They were an
  ultraconservative group that recommended the
  return to the Southern culture based on the small
  farm, the agricultural town, and the recovery of
  the traditional virtues of the Old South prior
  to the Civil War.

6
Lesson 5 American New Criticism and Its
Forerunners

• The role of literature in such a conservative
  political and cultural programme
• Literature was looked upon as the communicator
  and preserver of central human values. To do
  this, literature had to be popularised.
• This is why New Criticism has such a large
  pedagogical dimension teaching of criticism on a
  mass scale, so composition of University
  departments had to be changed. Three forms of
  influence
• Staffing of University departments
• Founding of influential journals Kenyon Review,
  The Southern Review, The Sewanee Review, Hound
  and Horn, etc.
• Publishing highly influential text-books An
  Approach to Literature (1936), Understanding
  Poetry (1938), Understanding Fiction (1943), and
  Understanding Drama (1945).

7
Lesson 5 American New Criticism and Its
Forerunners

• Literary views and critical methods
• ? Common features of English Practical Criticism
  and American New Criticism
• ? Text-centred schools of criticism as a reaction
  to philological, historical, and contextual
  methods. Therefore, contextual and political
  readings were ignored or ruled out.
• Typical choice of texts, never subjected to
  criticism
• Texts by Anglo-Saxon, middle-class, male
  individuals, i.e. a narrow canonical definition
  of literature.
• Only short texts were eligible, owing to close
  methods of analysis shortness and concentration
  were hallmark of valuable literature.

8
Lesson 5 American New Criticism and Its
Forerunners
? English Practical Criticism ? It grew out of
the desire to rescue literary studies from the
field of historicism and philology, and create a
specific subject of literary criticism, endowing
it with a dignified, recognisable status and
loosely scientific methods. ? The modus operandi
of English Practical Criticism as developed by
Richards (a) confrontation of reader with
decontextualised texts (b) reader comments on
them and records his response in complete
ignorance of their social, historical, cultural
origin and identity of their authors (c) then,
Richards analysed these responses and tried to
draw conclusions on how literary judgement was
formed many paradoxes arose. ? In the case of
Practical Criticism, psychological interest was
central to the method adopted. This would be
criticised by more dogmatic new critcs.
9
Lesson 5 American New Criticism and Its
Forerunners

• ? American New Critics
• More radical than Richards in advocating the
  exclusive study of the words on the page. Thus
  they reduced the field of literature to that of
  the concrete text or poem.
• They strongly rejected any appeal to non-textual
  facts in literary criticism and formulated their
  celebrated fallacies
• The intentional fallacy is the fallacy involved
  in trying to interpret a text by means of an
  appeal to the supposed intentions of its author.
• The affective fallacy is the fallacy involved
  in judging a literary work by the effects it has
  on the reader, i.e. according to reader's
  response.

10
Lesson 5 American New Criticism and Its
Forerunners
The mimetic fallacy is the fallacy involved in
considering the work as a direct imitation of
some external reality or the author's own
experience. The communicative fallacy the
fallacy involved in considering the literary work
as a means to communicate thought, doctrine, etc.
11
Lesson 5 American New Criticism and Its
Forerunners
? They strongly believed in the inseparability of
form and content, to the extent that forms were
indeed contents and therefore they spoke of the
heresy of paraphrase, i.e. the impossibility of
changing the form of a poem since its meaning
would be irretrievably lost. ? They established
a great separation between literary discourse
(which was unparaphrasable) and scientific
discourse, which could be expressed in different
forms since it was not tied to its form. ? They
developed a critical vocabulary that became
universal, though it was not made according to
scientific criteria. Words such as organic unity,
integrated structure, imagery, texture vs.
structure, tension, contrast, balance, ambiguity,
paradox, variety within unity, irony, etc.