Tiêu đề 39 # The New Criticism.pdf ✅

The New Criticism The New Criticism was extraordinarily influential from the end of the 1930s on into the 1950s. It is widely considered to have revolutionized the teaching of literature, to have helped in the definition of English Studies, and to have been a crucial starting-point for the development of critical theory in the second half of the twentieth century. However, it is in some respects an unusual critical theoretical movement. It is not dominated by any single critic, it has no manifesto, no clearly defined and agreed-upon starting-point, and there is no clear statement of its aims, provenance, and membership. The label that we have for it was first formally applied in 1941, in a book with that title by the American poet and critic John Crowe Ransom; yet Ransom's book was as much about the need for a certain kind of critic as it was about identifying New Criticism. There is no
typical 'New Critic'. The critics whom Ransom examined in his 1941 book promptly rejected the label and dissociated themselves from what he was calling New Criticism, while the critics who are now usually designated New Critics were hardly mentioned by Ransom at all. Rather than calling it a critical movement. New Criticism may be better described as an empirical methodology that was, at its most basic and most influential, a reading practice. As such, it was a practice that was expressed most cogently in three important books: Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and Practical Criticism (1929) by the English critic I. A. Richards, and Understanding Poetry (1938) by the Americans Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. In their different ways, each of these works grew out of perceived needs regarding the definition of English as a discipline, and the teaching and study of English in universities. Defining the discipline of English, or indeed, literary criticism, meant a loosening of the links that had in the past bound English so closely to other disciplines, notably Classics and History. In this respect the New Criticism was crucial in helping to define English Studies, clarifying the role of the literary critic and shaping the development of departments of English in universities. It is in this spirit that John Crowe Ransom’s essays 'Wanted: An Ontological Critic' (the concluding section of his The New Criticism) and ‘Criticism Inc.’ (1938) are of particular importance. In a perhaps more pragmatic way, the New Criticism was also crucial in developing teaching practices that are still used in the classroom. Richards wrote Practical Criticism because he felt that undergraduates at Cambridge had never been taught to read literary texts by closely focusing on the words before them on the page. In a series of experiments, Richards provided undergraduates with the texts, without providing the names of the authors or the titles, of eleven previously unseen poems, and asked them to provide written responses. He noted from these the students' general inability to comprehend meaning and to be sensitive to nuance and linguistic ambiguity. Their responses, Richards thought, were too often vague and impressionistic.
Consequently, he argued that the practice of teaching English had to change radically in order to help develop modes of comprehension and ways of paying attention to the text's language. Although its aims were different, and its proposed readership was university undergraduates, Brooks and Warren's Understanding Poetry originated in a similar dissatisfaction with the state of English teaching. While teaching at the Louisiana State University in 1936, Brooks and Warren, in collaboration with another colleague, produced a guide for their students called An Approach to Literature. Understanding Poetry arose from the same impulse, and played a significant part in the systematization of teaching English; it became a widely distributed college textbook and poetry anthology, being published in four different editions between 1938 and 1976. In this respect it is important to bear in mind that the expansion of entry into higher education after 1945 played a key role in the dissemination and practice of the New Criticism. It is easy to exaggerate this aspect of its development, and some commentators have, but an empirical teaching methodology was welcomed in the post-war years. Practical Criticism and Understanding Poetry are key foundational texts for New Critical theory in their shared insistence on the special nature of the language of the literary artefact. It is interesting that the first title considered for Understanding Poetry was ‘Reading Poems.’ Understanding Poetry is a better title, because it indicates that there is a principle of reading poetry that must be learned, whereas 'Reading Poems' suggests developing strategies for approaching individual poems. Language functions in a different way in a work of literature than it does elsewhere, and the first job of the reader is to acknowledge and apprehend this special function and the role it plays in the formation of meaning. In this regard, New Criticism is aligned with formalism, and significant connections have been made between New Criticism and Russian formalism. Both place special emphasis on the formal elements of the literary text, because these most obviously signalled the crucial distinction between literary and non-literary uses of language. It also needs to be emphasised that