New Criticism

NEW CRITICISM

New criticism dominated literary studies from the 1940s through the 1960s. It has left a lasting imprint on the way we read and write about literature. Some of its concepts concerning the nature and importance of textual evidence have been incorporated into the way most literary critics today support their reading of literature. Literary interpretation which New Criticism called “close reading” has been a standard method in literary studies for the past several decades.

“The text itself”

New Criticism replaced the biographical-historical criticism that dominated literary studies in the nineteenth century and the early decades of twentieth. At this time, it was common practice to interpret a literary text by studying the author’s life and times to determine ‘authorial intention’. The author’s letters, diaries, and essays were combed for evidence of authorial intensive as were autobiographies, biographies and history books. Biographical-historical criticism seemed to examine the text’s biographical-historical context instead of examining the text.

“The text itself” became the battle cry of the New Critical effort to focus our attention on the literary works as the sole source of evidence for interpreting it. The life and times of the author and the spirit of the age in which he or she lived are certainly of interest to the literary historian but they do not provide the literary critic with information that can be used to analyze the text itself. In the first place, they pointed out that knowledge of the author’s intended meaning is usually unavailable. We can’t telephone William Shakespeare and ask him how he intended us to interpret Hamlet’s hesitation in carrying out the instructions of his father’s ghost, and Shakespeare left no written explanation of his intention. Sometimes a literary text doesn’t live up to the author’s intension. Sometimes it is more meaningful, rich and complex than the author realized. And sometimes the text’s meaning is simply different from the meaning the author wanted it to have. Knowing an author’s intension tells us nothing about the text itself which New Criticism coined the word “intentional fallacy” to refer to the mistaken belief that the author’s intension is the same as the text’s meaning.

We cannot look to the author’s intension to find the meaning of a literary text. Neither can we look to the reader’s personal response to find it. Any given reader may or may not respond to what is actually provided by the text itself. Reader’s feeling or opinions about a text may be produced by some personal association from past experience rather than by the text. While the intentional fallacy confuses the text with its origins, the “affective fallacy” confuses the text with its affects, that is, with the emotions it produces. The affective fallacy tends to impressionistic responses and relativism.

Although the author’s intention or the reader’s response is sometimes mentioned in New Critical readings of literary texts, neither one is the focus of analysis. If a given author’s intension or a given reader’s interpretation actually represents the text’s meaning is to carefully examine or “closely read”, all the evidence provided by the language of the text itself: its images, symbols, metaphors, rhyme, meter, point of view, setting, characterization are called its “formal elements”.

For New Criticism, a literary work is a “timeless”, “autonomous verbal object”. Readers and readings may change but the literary text stays the same. Its meaning is as objective as its physical existence in the page.

Literary language and organic unity

The importance of the formal elements of a literary text is a product of the nature of “literary language”. For New Criticism, literary language is very different from scientific language and from everyday language. Scientific language and everyday language depends on denotation, the one-to-one correspondence between words and the objects or ideas they represent. Scientific language doesn’t draw attention to itself. It doesn’t try to be beautiful or emotionally evocative. Its job is to point not to itself but to the physical world beyond it, which it attempts to describe and explain. Literary language, in control depends on connation. It depends on the implication, association, suggestion & a vocation of meanings & of shades of meaning. Literary language is expressive. It communicates tone, attitude & feeling. While everyday language is often connotative. Its main chief purpose is practical. Literary language organizes linguistic resources into a special arrangement, a complex unity, to create an aesthetic experience.

The form of literary language is inseparable from its content, its meaning. ‘How’ a literary text means is inseparable from ‘what’ it means. The work’s organic unity which means the working together of all the parts to make an inseparable whole, is the criterion by which if a text has an organic unity, then all of its formal elements work together to establish its theme, or the meaning of the work as a whole. Though its organic unity, or the text provides both the ‘complexity’ that a literary text must have and the ‘order’ that human beings seek. For new criticism, the explanation of literary meaning & the evaluation of literary greatness became one and the same act.

For new criticism, the complexity of a text is created by the multiple and often conflicting woven through it. And these meanings are a product offer kinds of linguistic devices: Paradox, Irony, Ambiguity, and Tension. Paradox is a statement that seems self-contradictory but represents the actual way things are. New criticism observed that paradox is responsible for much of the complexity of human experience and of the literature thus portrays it. ‘Irony’ means a statement or event under- mined by the context in which it occurs. New criticism primarily valued irony to indicate a text’s inclusion of varying perspectives on the same characters or events.

‘Ambiguity’ occurs when a word, image, or event generates two or more different meaning. In scientific and everyday language, Ambiguity is usually considered a flaw because it’s equated with a lack of clarity and precision. In literary language ambiguity is considered a source of richness, depth, and complexity that adds to the text’s value.

Tension means the linking together of opposites. The complexity of a literary text is created by it. Tension is created by the integration of the abstract and the concrete images. Such concrete images and fictional characters that are meaningful on both the concrete level are considered a form of tension because they hold together the opposing realms of physical reality and symbolic reality in a way characteristic of literary language. Tension is also created by dynamic interplay among the text’s opposing tendencies, among its paradoxes, ironies, and ambiguities.

The complexity of the text must be complemented by a sense of order. Therefore, all of the multiple and conflicting meanings produced by the text’s paradoxes, ironies, ambiguities, and tensions must be resolved or harmonized by their shared contribution to the theme. The text’s ‘theme’ is not the same thing as its topic. Rather, the theme is what the text does with its topic. The theme is an interpretation of human experience. If the text is a great one, the theme serves as a commentary on human values, human nature, or the human condition. Great literary works have themes of universal human significance. They tell us something important about what it means to be human. We may not like or agree with the theme a story offers, but we can still see what that theme is, and most important for New criticism, we can judge whether or not that theme is established by the text’s formal elements in a way that produces an organic unity. ‘Close reading’, which means the scrupulous examination of the complex relationship between a text’s formal elements and its theme, is how the text’s organic unity was established by New Critic. Because of New Criticism’s belief, the literary text can be understood primarily by understanding its form.

‘Figurative language’ is language that has more than a strictly literal meaning. For example, “it’s raining cats and dogs” is a figurative expression which used to indicate that it’s raining very heavily. If we take literally, then the phrase would mean that actual cats and dogs were falling from the sky. An ‘image’ consists of a word or words that refer to an object perception themselves: colors, shapes, lightings, tastes, sounds, smells, textures, temperatures and so on. Image always has literal meaning.

If an image occurs repeatedly in a text, it probably has symbolic significance. A ‘symbol’ is an image that has both literal and figurative meaning. Public symbols are usually easy to spot. For example, spring is usually a symbol of rebirth or youth; autumn is usually a symbol of death or dying, a river is usually a symbol of life or of a journey. Thus, a symbol has properties similar to those of the abstract idea it stands for. The example, a river can symbolize life because both a river and life are fluid and forward moving; both have a source and an endpoint.

The context provided by the text also helps us to figure out a symbol’s meaning. Sometimes, the context provided by the text is all we have to go on because some symbols are private, or meaningful only to the author, and therefore more difficult to figure out. We may suspect, for example, that the image of a purple felt hat has symbolic significance in a story because it recurs frequently or play a role that seems to reverberate with some abstract quality such as love or loneliness or strength, but we’ll have to figure out what symbolic significance is by studying how the hat operates within the overall meaning of the text. How something operates within the overall meaning of the text was always the bottom line for New Criticism, so it does not matter whether or not our analysis of the text’s private symbolisms matches the author’s intension. What matters is that our analysis of the text’s private symbolisms supports what we claim is the text’s theme.

A ‘metaphor’ has only figurative meaning. A metaphor is a comparison of two dissimilar objects in which the properties of one are ascribed to the other. For example, the phrase “my mother is a gem” is a metaphor. It has no literal meaning. It would mean that my mother gave birth to a crystalline stone. The figurative meaning of the phrase is that my mother shares certain properties with a gem. Thus, “he’s a gem” is generally used to mean “he’s a great guy”. To get from metaphor to ‘simile’ requires one small step: add ‘like’ or ‘as’. “My mother is like a gem” or “my brother is as valuable as a gem” are similes that make the same comparison as the metaphor. The simile is softer because the connection between the idea of “brother” and the idea of “gem” is less direct or less forceful.

A New Critical reading of “There is a Girl Inside”

There Is a Girl Inside

there is a girl inside. she is randy as a wolf. she will not walk away and leave these bones to an old woman. she is a green tree in a forest of kindling. she is a green girl in a used poet. she has waited patient as nun for the second coming, when she can break through gray hairs into blossom and her lovers will harvest honey and thyme and the woods will be wild with the damn wonder of it.

The poem’s title “There Is a Girl Inside” tells us that the speaker is an old woman who still feels young and vital inside. So we know that the central tension in the poem is probably the tension between youth and age, between what the speaker feels like on the inside and what she looks like on the outside. We can see that this tension structures the poem as a whole through the alternation of the language of youthful vitality with the language of aging and decay. In the poem, the words “girl”, “randy” means sexually free or assertive. The narrative dimension of the poem reveals an old woman dreaming about the miraculous transformation, the “second coming” of youth, despite her “bones” and “gray hairs”. Thus we might hypothesize that the theme of the poem probably involves the paradox of timeless youth. To discover the specific nature of the theme, and to understand how the poem establishes it, we need to closely examine the poem’s formal elements.

The first thing we might notice is that the alternation of images of youth with images of age ends with the fourth line of the third stanza. The final five lines of the poem consist of images of youth, fertility, and sexuality, and they evoke the youthfulness the speaker believes can overpower age. There are total of five full stops in the first two stanzas, but there is only one comma in the third stanza and no punctuation at all in the final stanza until we get to the period that ends the poem. This dramatic decrease in punctuation or decrease in stops and pauses, suggests acceleration, excitement, and power reinforcing the emphasis on the victory of youth in the final stanza.

The speaker has used the powerful verbs in the active voice such as the girl inside “will not walk away”, she “can break through”, and “her lovers will harvest”. These powerful, active verbs reinforce the idea that this girl is powerful and active, strong enough to get what she wants. The use of “has waited” in the third stanza reinforces the idea that the girl inside is ready to emerge. The simile “she is randy as a wolf” for a wolf is a powerful animal that fights what if wants and usually gets what it fight for.

“Green girl” implies that the girl is inexperienced, naive, unused to the world. And this aspect of the image fits nicely with the simile in the second line of the next stanza: “patient as a nun”. Nuns take a promise of chastity, poverty and obedience which means that they renounce the material world. The image of the nun forms a bridge between the inexperienced girl and the old woman. And as a nun waits patiently for her reward, so the woman and the girl inside have both waited patiently for the second coming of the youth. The words “harvest”, “honey”, and “thyme” have as ambiguity that also reinforces the bond between youth and age. In addition to their connotations of youthful sexual vitality, “harvest”, “honey” and “thyme” can refer to activities associated with autumn and therefore with the old woman.

A harvest occurs in the fall of the end of the growing season, when the plants are fully mature, not when they are “green”, or young, like the “green girl” inside. Honey is the product bees make from flower pollen after the pollen is harvested; beekeepers harvest the honey from the hive after it is made. And thyme is used primarily after it has dried up. The word “kindling” in the second stanza has an ambiguity that is useful in this context. “Kindling” refers to old, dried-up wood used to start fires. But the very fact that kindling catches the fire so easily associated with the quality of passion, which also “catches fire” easily.

The poem’s “tone” might be helpful to think of as the speaker’s tone of voice, for it expresses speaker’s attitude toward what he or she is saying and toward the reader. In this poem the use of the word “randy” to indicate sexual hunger in the second line of the poem and “damn” in the final stanza tells us that the tone is somewhat playful and irreverent, a tone often associated with youth.

The theme of “There Is a Girl Inside” is not merely a restatement of the old adage but a transformation of that adage into a new one of equally universal importance. The poem suggests that age brings with it a special “harvest” of its own, which is the capacity to appreciate the gifts of youth that remain within us as seeds remain within a ripened fruit, as a result, to feel young even when we are old. Thus the theme of the poem revolves the tension between youth and age that structures it. We can conclude that the poem has an organic unity because its theme is carried by all of its formal elements. The poem appears to be charmingly, and disarmingly, simple, our analysis of its organic unity revel a surprising complexity in the operations of its formal elements. From a New Critical perspective, “There Is a Girl Inside” is finely created literary text, a combined, a unified, complex art object the theme of which has universal human significance.