Download New Criticism

Geovanny J. Berríos
New Criticism
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Is a type of formalist current of literary
theory that dominated AngloAmerican literary criticism in the middle
decades of the 20th century. It
emphasized close reading, particularly
of poetry, to discover how a work of
literature functioned as a self-contained,
self-referential aesthetic object.
To the New Critics, poetry was a special kind
of discourse, a means of communicating
feeling and thought that could not be
expressed in any other kind of language. It
differed from the language of science or
philosophy, but it conveyed equally valid
meanings.
The common denominator of the authors of
the New Criticism was systematized by
Wimsatt in a series of points to criticize some
assumptions of traditional literary studies:
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Internal evidence: Internal evidence is the actual
details present inside a given work. The apparent
content of a work is the internal evidence, including any
historical knowledge and past expertise or experience
with the kind of art being interpreted that is required to
understand what that work is: its forms and traditions.
The form of epic poetry, the meter, quotations etc. are
internal to the work.
Intentional fallacy: a poem's meaning is nothing more
than an expression of the private experiences or
intention of its author vs. the poet's mind as a catalyst,
bringing together the experiences of the author's
personality into an external object and a new creation.
The poem is about the experiences of the author that
are similar to all of our experiences.
External evidence: What is not literally contained
in the work itself is external to that work, including
all statements the artist made privately or
published in journals about the work, or in
conversations, e-mail, etc. External evidence is
concerned with claims about why the artist made
the work: reasons external to the fact of the work
in itself.
 Organic unity: the critic's job, ascertain the
structure of the poem, to see how it operates to
achieve its unity, and to discover how meaning
evolves directly from the poem itself. How
meaning is achieved through the various and
sometimes conflicting elements operating in the
poem itself.
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Contextual evidence: The third type of
evidence concerns any meanings produced
from a particular work's relationship to other
art made by the same artist—including its
exhibition (where, when and by whom). The
use of biographical information in a
discussion of an artwork does
not necessarily indicate an intentional fallacy.
Reference
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_fallacy
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affective_fallacy
 http://www.wsu.edu/~delahoyd/new.crit.html
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