1. New Criticism A poem must not mean/ But be” (Archibald McLeish) - “It’s never what a poem says which matters, but what it is” (I. A. Richards)
(Formalism, Liberal Humanism, Practical Criticism)
Course Instructor: Raj Thakur

2. Distinctive Features:
“Words on the page”
The “text itself”, close reading of the text
Autotelic text , text as a self sufficient entity
Form and Organic Form
Non-conceptual literary meaning
Aesthetic humanistic idealisation of literature

3. New Criticism Origin/Background:
Classical Aesthetics Preoccupation with Form:
Plato’s dialectics towards Socratic wisdom by his imagery, metaphor, setting and tone
Aristotelian emphasis on “orderly arrangement of parts” , a “beautiful whole”
Horace’s debunking of the ‘would be poet’- “In short, be your subject what it will, let it be simple and unified”

4. Background: Anti- Romantic Credo in Modern Literary Criticism:
T.S. Eliot's New Classicism
Impersonal Theory of Poetry
Objective Correlative
Championing of Metaphysical Poets (Unified Sensibility)
Retreat from Realism, Naturalism, Romanticism and the rise of literary and artistic movements like
Imagism
Futurism, Cubism
(subject to objective and scientific scholarship)

5. Influence of T.E. Hulme, EzraPound, Irving Babbit:
T.E. Hulme’s new Kind of classicism- “Romanticism and Classicism” (1924)- “dry hard classical verse” to replace sentimentalism in literature (derivative name of Imagism)
Ezra Pound and Imagism
Irving Babbit and ‘New Humanism’. Rousseau and Romanticism (1919): calls for restraint and emphasis on classical, Christian outlook sans Rousseau’s negative influence

6. Influence of Russian Formalism:
Emphasis on the ‘special use of language’
Distinction between ‘practical language and ‘literary’ language in terms of latter’s constructed quality- “speech organized on its phonic texture”
Poetry as an “organized violence committed on speech” (Roman Jakobson)
Shklovsky’s ‘Defamiliarization’, ostranenie: ‘making strange’ and ‘laying bare’ of the formand devices

7. Different Schools of New Criticism: (spanned around 1920-1970)
British School:
I A Richards : Principle of Literary Criticism (1924): exclusive theoretical base for ‘literary’ study
Science and Poetry (9126): strict demarcation between ‘emotive’ language of poetry and ‘referntial’ language if non- literary discourses
Practical Criticism (1929): lecture room experimwent- close reading of the poem

8. William Empson: Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930):
Emphasizing on ‘ambiguity’ as a poetic trope of richness rather than fault
F.R. Leavis-: defense against the destructive ‘technologico Benthamite’

9. American School : Political backdrop:
‘Agrarians’ and ‘The Fugitives’, The Southern New Critics (majorly John Crow Ransom and Cleanth Brooks) movement hostile to the hard- nosed industrialism and materialism of the North.
John Crowe Ransom: The New Criticism (1941)
“Criticism Inc.”: literary criticism as a business of professionals,
criticism as ‘scientific', 'precise’ and ‘systematic’

10. Cleanth Brooks Understanding Poetry (1938)
Understanding Fiction (1943)
Emphasis on dramatic propriety, ‘Irony’ and ‘Paradox’
The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the structure of Poetry (1947): textualizes eponymous urn of Keats ode in the context of the dramatic organic element of the whole
Focus on the “Structurality of the Structure” ,
Text is sucked to structure

11. William K Wimsatt and Monroe. C
William K Wimsatt and Monroe. C. Beardsley: “The Intentional Fallacy” (1946) “The Affective Fallacy” (1949)
‘Addresser’(Writer) (INTENTIONAL FALLACY- confusion between poem and its intent) >
‘Message’ (Text)> ‘Addressee’ (Reader) (AFFECTIVE FALLACY- confusion between poem and its results)
“design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the work of literary art”