Lecture Two Reading for Meaning Anglo-American New Criticism

Anglo-American New Criticism Anglo-American New Criticism emerged at Cambridge University with the literary academic I.A. Richards (1893– 1979). The group later was led by the critic F.R. Leavis (1895– 1979). Each of them in his own way disagreed with some of Eliot’s claims Both of them initiated two intimately related ‘schools’ that would give shape to English and American thinking about literature for almost fifty years.

I.A. Richards (1893–1979) In Richards’s emphasis on the poem itself became what we call practical criticism. In a still fascinating experiment Richards rejected all extra- textual information – no author, period, or explanatory commentary. He asked the readers to respond to poems that were thus completely stripped of their context. It would be difficult to think up a more text-oriented approach. Richards developed his practical criticism – the label was popularized through the title of a book he published in 1924 Richards emphasized the importance of literature and, more in particular, poetry.

I.A. Richards (1893–1979) Richards saw in poetry an antidote to the spiritual malaise that seemed to pave the way for chaos. Poetry, and the arts in general, could save us because it is there that we find what is truly, and lastingly valuable – what gives meaning to our lives. For Richards the minds of artists are in control of whatever may befall them; They reconcile contradictions, and transcend our usual self- centredness. This command and transcendence would originate within the artists themselves. We are offered a perfect picture of the liberal humanist individual or subject.

I.A. Richards (1893–1979) Human Liberalism states that: One who can understands literature can write or interpret literature too. Literature is of timeless significance. The literary text contains its own meaning within itself, The literary text can (and must) be studies in isolation from contexts of any kind. Human nature is essentially unchanging. Individuality is something securely possessed within each of us as our unique ‘essence’.

I.A. Richards (1893–1979) Human Liberalism states that: The subject is antecedent to and thus transcends the forces of society, experience, and language. The purpose of literature is essentially the enhancement of life and the propagation of humane values. Criteria of excellence: organic fusion of form and content, ‘sincerity’, • showing/‘enactment’ rather than explanation.

I.A. Richards (1893–1979) According to Richards, arts are our storehouse of recorded values. They supply the best data for deciding what experiences are more valuable than others. Literary art, then, helps us to evaluate our own experience, to assess our personal life. It is all the better equipped for this because its language is not scientific but emotive. Scientific language is for Richards language that refers to the real world and makes statements that are either true or false. Emotive language, however, wants to produce certain emotional effects and a certain attitude in those to whom it addresses itself.

I.A. Richards (1893–1979) Literature, then, conveys a certain type of knowledge which is not scientific and factual but has to do with values and meaningfulness and which makes use of language that expresses and manipulates emotions. Practical criticism focuses upon the text and the text alone. Practical criticism became a major instrument in spreading the idea that the best poems created a vulnerable harmony – a precarious coherence – out of conflicting perspectives and emotions. In the United States, this view would develop into the New Criticism that in the 1930s and 1940s became the major mode of criticism there.

F.R. Leavis (1895–1979) F.R. Leavis was also a Cambridge academic like Richards. Leavis subjected the history of English poetry to an icy scrutiny. He relegated a good many English poets of fine repute (including John Milton) to minor status. He accused the nineteenth-century poets of a ‘divorce between thought and feeling, intelligence and sensibility’ In his work of the later 1940s, he sets out to revaluate the English novel. Until Leavis changed the picture, fiction had gone largely unnoticed. Novels cannot very well be subjected to the same sort of analysis that we use with poems

F.R. Leavis (1895–1979) Leavis begun to include a moralistic dimension. Leavis puts a premium on oppositions, juxtapositions, inversions, and similar techniques. Moreover, he comes to judge poems in terms of the ‘life’ and the ‘concreteness’ they succeed in conveying. He begins to discuss content as relatively independent of form This is a little bit different from the other New Critics who state that form and content are inseparably interwoven. In fact, for the New Critics that interweaving determined to a considerable extent the quality of the text under discussion.

F.R. Leavis (1895–1979) For Leavis, form became of secondary importance. What the literary work should provide was a mature apprehension of authentic life. For Leavis, authentic representations of life depended on a writer’s personal authenticity and moral integrity. He believes that novel can represent life in all its fullness because of its scope and its attention to authentic detail. Novel is for Leavis superior to whatever the other arts or the human sciences (such as psychology or sociology) may have to offer.

F.R. Leavis (1895–1979) Leavis almost inevitably came to focus on the novel, with its endless possibilities for presenting character, setting, theme, social background, and everything imaginable. The novel has more to offer than lyrical poetry. So, Leavis brought the novel into the amazing professionalization of the study of English as it had started in the 1920s.

Meaning in the United States In the 1930s, the work of Eliot, Richards, and Leavis found a warm welcome in America. A group of poets, including John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks, who in the mid-1930s initiated New Criticism in America. These label New Critics derives from the title of Ransom’s 1941 book The New Criticism The New Critics saw that the so-called triumphs of modern science, in combination with capitalistic greed, threatened to destroy tradition and everything that was not immediately useful – including poetry. They turned to the past in search of organic unity and social harmony that had not yet been destroyed by the industrialization and commercialization of the contemporary world.

Meaning in the United States The New Critics, then, saw poetry as a means of resisting commodification and superficiality. Because of its internal organization – its formal structure – a poem created harmony out of opposites and tension and thereby presented a vital alternative. In creating coherent wholes out of the full variety and contradictory complexity of life, poetry halted and transcended the chaotic flux of actual experience. John Crowe Ransom stated that the poet perpetuates in his poem an order of existence which in actual life is constantly crumbling beneath his touch. His poem celebrates the object which is real, individual, and qualitatively infinite.

Meaning in the United States In so doing, one of the poet’s main strategies was the use of paradox Paradox means a statement containing contradictory aspects The American New Critics see poems as storehouses of authentic values and as expressing important truths about the complexities of life that no other medium can convey nearly as effectively. The American New Critics exclude both the poet and the reader from their approach to poetry. As a result, they focus more on the actual form of literary works than their English counterparts.

Meaning in the United States The New Critical approach to literature might well be considered formalistic It does indeed often go by that label. However, they are not interested in form for its own sake, but in form as contributing to a text’s meaning.

Denotation vs. connotation According to Brooks, the poet’s language is a language in which the connotations play as great a part as the denotations. Moreover, for the New Critics, a poem had to be fully experienced in order to be effective. ‘A poem should not mean, but be’, as they said, meaning that the ‘message’ that we can extract from a poem cannot possibly do justice to its complexity. Anything but the entirety of its paradoxes, opposites, and reconciling ironies is reductive and damaging. The habit that we all have of summarizing a poem – and other works of literature – in one or two phrases was for the New Critics a deadly sin against the poem and against our own experience of the poem.

Heresies and Falacies Turning a poem into a thematic statement was for the New Critics the ‘heresy of paraphrase’. In 1954, William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley published a classic and controversial New Critical essay entitled "The Intentional Fallacy“. In this essay, they argued strongly against the relevance of an author's intention, or "intended meaning" in the analysis of a literary work. For Wimsatt and Beardsley, the words on the page were all that mattered; importation of meanings from outside the text was considered irrelevant, and potentially distracting.

Heresies and Fallacies The other essay, "The Affective Fallacy” served as a kind of sister essay to "The Intentional Fallacy. Wimsatt and Beardsley also discounted the reader's personal/emotional reaction to a literary work as a valid means of analyzing a text. While the ‘intentional fallacy’ has to do with the author, the ‘affective fallacy’ has to do with the reader. Readers who are prone to this fallacy confuse their own emotional response to the poem with what the poem really tells them. The way the poem affects them blinds them to its reality. Tears blur the picture, both literally and figuratively.

Heresies and Fallacies Studying a passage of prose or poetry in New Critical style required careful, exacting scrutiny of the passage itself. Formal elements such as rhyme, meter, setting, characterization, and plot were used to identify the theme of the text. In addition to the theme, the New Critics also looked for paradox, ambiguity, irony, and tension to help establish the single best and most unified interpretation of the text. Such an approach has been criticized as constituting a conservative attempt to isolate the text and to shield it from external, political concerns such as those of race, class, and gender.