Hey! Professor Hitch here, and today, I want to talk to you about New Criticism! Well,
the first thing we need to know is: "Is it new anymore?" and the answer is actually, "No,
um, but it does occupy an unusual position in the field of literary studies today because
while it's no longer a new current theory it was such an impactful theory that it has
changed the way that we've thought about reading and literature and literary analysis ever since."
So, to fully appreciate new criticism's contribution to literary studies today,
we need to remember the form of criticism that it replaced, the biographical historical criticism
that dominated literary studies in the 19th century and early decades of the 20th century.
Uh, it used to be that in order to study a text, you had to study basically everything
but the text, you had to study the history of the author, the history of the period in
which the text was written. For new critics, the text itself was treated as the sole source for
interpreting a text... This might not sound like a very radical idea to those of you watching
the video, but if it doesn't, that's just goes to show you how influential new criticism is.
It literally changed everything about how we think about literary analysis!
So, there are some fallacies that we need to cover before we get any further. The first
is intentional fallacy, the mistaken belief that the author's intention is the same as the text's
intention. That's actually not always the case, uh, let me offer an example. Let's say that,
um, I wrote a story 20 years ago, uh, when I was 10 years old ... oh my god, I'm so old! ... and
this story that I wrote 10 years ago, if i was to recover it today, open it up, and take a look
at it, I ... I probably could not tell you why I wrote that story. Um, I forgot my own intention,
it doesn't exist anymore, if it ever existed to begin with. The only thing left that we have
to deal with is the text itself, that's what the intentional fallacy is getting at. Even though we
want to use the author's intention as the text's meaning, that's not always the case.
The other fallacy is a affective fallacy, which refers to confusing the text with the emotional
response that it might produce. Just because the story makes you sad or happy or maybe freaked out
doesn't actually mean that it's going to make everybody feel the same way that it made you feel.
So, how does new criticism function? Well, the reader must closely read all the evidence
provided by the language of the text itself. That's literally everything, images, symbols,
metaphors, rhyme meter, point of view, setting, characterization, and so on.
All these things form its formal elements. This will determine whether the author's
intention or a given reader's interpretation actually represents the text's meaning.
Literary language ... very different from scientific language and everyday language
which both depend on denotation, the one-to-one correspondence between words and objects of
ideas they represent. In scientific and everyday language, when you say something, you mean the
thing you said. Literary language, on the other hand, in contrast, depends on connotation,
on implication association, suggestion. Um, this is really where new criticism gets its
power! Literary language often has sort of another meaning, a double meaning, maybe even
triple meaning, and new criticism's goal is to investigate the text to find out what those hidden
meanings are. Now, when we're talking about that, we have to look at something called organic unity,
uh, it's organic unity is the working together of all the parts to make it inseparable.
Um, so think about the formal elements of a text, think about its literary language.
Once you fully study those individual elements and you decide how they're working together,
the way that they're working together is called organic unity.
New Criticism as an objective, intrinsic criticism. So, because new critics believed
their interpretations were solely based on the context created by the text and the language
provided by the text, they called their critical practice intrinsic criticism. Think of intrinsic
as coming from inside, coming from inside the text. New Critics also called their
approach objective criticism because their focus on the text's formal elements ensured
they claimed that each text itself would dictate how it would be interpreted. Now, um, depending on
other literary theories that you may be studying, you know that that's not a hundred percent true,
but if you are going to use new criticism in your essay, you need to act like it is true, you need
to act like this is the objective intrinsic criticism that new critics believe it to be.
New Criticism is after the single best interpretation. Given that the text has
thus seen as an independent entity with a stable meaning of its own, new critics believed that
a single best or most accurate interpretation of each text could be discovered. That is why
during new criticism's heyday essays interpreting a literary text frequently began with a survey
of all the other interpretations that were out there. It's sort of like for new critics in order
to prove that you have the best, you need to prove everybody else is worse than your interpretation.
So, what is the question that new critics ask about literary texts? Well, I have
two, uh, question number one: what single interpretation of the text best establishes
its organic unity? In other words, question number two: how does the text's formal elements
and the multiple meanings those elements produce all work together to support the theme or overall
meaning of the work? Remember, a great work will have a theme of universal human significance.
Also please note if the text is too long to account for all of its formal elements,
you might just apply this concept to one part of the text and not the whole text.
Don't go through the entire list of formal elements; pick out one, maybe two, three tops,
and study those formal elements and how they relate to some organic unity, some universal
theme of human significance. Essentially, new criticism is the study of how the parts of a
story work together to produce a whole. It's very analytical in nature that way, and there you go!