11 New Criticism Lecture Notes and Presentation
Slide One: New Criticism: The Business of Literature
Welcome. I’m Dr. Liza Long. In this presentation, we’ll learn more about New Criticism. You’ll notice that I’m using the target image again, which we’ll use throughout the course. For New Criticism, the center of our target is the text. New Criticism is a formalist approach to literary analysis that looks at literature for the sake of literature, similar to a phrase you may have heard, ars gratis artis, or art for the sake of art. The name New Criticism comes from John Crowe Ransom’s 1941 book, The New Criticism. We will read a short excerpt from an essay Ransom wrote called “Criticism, Inc.,” which outlines his belief that the study of literature should be scientific and empirical in its approach.
Whether you know the name or not, New Criticism is something that probably already feels familiar to you. This is the type of critical approach many high school and introductory college literature courses take to analyzing texts. It starts with what we call a close reading of the text. This is a very slow, careful, word by word and line by line reading, where you are noticing a variety of elements that work together to make the text complex. With New Criticism, we are interested in analyzing literature, and that means that the text must have a certain level of complexity. It’s not something you would read on a blog or social media, It’s a carefully crafted text.
In our close reading, we are looking for nothing less than evidence of greatness. It is important to note here that in New Criticism, author intent does not matter at all. We don’t care what the author wanted us to get out of the of the writing; what we care about is what the text itself says. In high school when you were asked to analyze a book or a play or a poem, you probably started with a close reading and looked for elements that made the text worth your time.
Slide Two: Close Reading: “Ars Poetica”
Let’s take a look at what a close reading actually is. The 1926 poem “Ars Poetica” by Archibald MacLeish, which you read as an example in our textbook, gives us an excellent example of how literature was developing in conversation with critical theory. This work has all the good stuff: complexity, irony, metaphor, imagery, the types of things New Critics look for when they decide that something is literature. The Ars Poetica poem is positioned in a tradition of texts that tell us how to write poetry, starting with the Latin poet Horace’s Ars Poetica, a text with which MacLeish is undoubtedly familiar. “Ars poetica” means “the art of poetry.” Even in its title, the poem starts to make a statement about what poetry is.
But this poem’s definition may be a bit different from how you seen poetry defined in the past. If you were going to define poetry, how would you define it? The Oxford English dictionary tells us that poetry is a “literary work in which special intensity is given to the expression of feelings and ideas by the use of distinctive style and rhythm.” But MacLeish is doing something different. Instead of telling us what a poem is, he’s showing us.
I’ve posted the poem here. You’ll notice I have numbered the lines. This is something you should always do when you start a close reading of a poem. When you return to write about the poem, you’ll use line numbers in your in-text citations.
I am going to read very slowly and look at the poem line by line. (Reads poem)
What stands out to you as you listen to this text? Think about terms you’ve learned in previous literature courses, like imagery. The poem compares poetry to a globed fruit, using metaphor. But the poem is also mute. How can a poem be mute? Shouldn’t a poem say something? This is a paradox, and it also creates tension. I think there are a lot of examples of tension in the poem. What about the line, “A poem is equal to:/Not true,” for example? Tension occurs when an image creates a sense that it’s not resolved.
These are just a few examples. As you read the poem, you’re going to be looking for things like this. And remember, what I’ll be looking for in your own writing is evidence from the text to support a thesis statement that makes an argument about the text. As much as possible, try to include evidence from the text.
The three principles of New Criticism that are at work in this poem are first, that the poem should be seen as an object. In other words, author intent doesn’t matter. So this object, this text, this artifact, transcends what’s written on the page. Second, the poem is silent, it’s unchanging, it exists both inside and outside of time. And third, the poem as an unchanging object represents something that’s organized, not a meaning, but an existence. As the poem states, “A poem should not mean/ but be.”
This quote from Steven Lynn, author of Texts and Contexts, really sums up the New Criticism approach: “Only the poem can tell us how to read the poem” (p. 51) Not the author, not someone else, only the poem. Your goal in New Criticism analysis is to find the unity in this complexity. The close reading is a form of scavenger hunt through the text, searching for clues to its meaning.
Slide Three: Why and How?
So why do we do this type of analysis? Really, first and foremost, those of you who’ve done this before, know that the first statement on this slide is true: a close reading of a text can be a pleasurable experience. It can actually feel good to engage with a text at this level. We feel like we’re really connecting with ideas and with beauty as we immerse ourselves in the text. A few cautionary words: When we do this type of close reading, we do want to avoid the intentional fallacy, and also the affective fallacy. We don’t care what the author intended, and we don’t care how the poem affects you, the individual reader. We are searching for universal truths about the text.
How does “Ars Poetica” make you feel? With New Criticism, your feelings about the poem do not matter. You can still talk about tone, emotion, etc. in the text, but you’re not focusing on your own feelings. For example, when I read the line, “For all the history of grief/ An empty doorway and a maple leaf,” you might have heard my voice catch. I cry every time I read this line. It affects me personally in profound ways, in ways that it may not affect you. But in New Criticism, my personal reaction to this line does not matter. Instead, what matters is how this image functions as a metaphor for the universal human emotion of grief.
Similarly, what the author intended when he wrote the poem doesn’t matter. What matters are the words on the page and the text itself. As you read, look for evidence that comes together to support an overarching theme. How do the parts of the poem or the short story or the novel shape the whole? As you’re reading the novel assigned for this course, pay attention to the parts and how they work together. Pay attention to the speaker, the point of view. Is it first or third person? If third person, is it limited or omniscient? How does characterization contribute to the complexity of the text? Also, with New Criticism, you should evaluate the craftsmanship and artistry of the work. That’s part of the reason I chose Klara and the Sun. There’s a high level of craftsmanship and artistry in this novel.
Ultimately, though, as you engage in this type of criticism, focus on how it can be a pleasurable experience. If you’re a creative writing major, think about how the approaches you are learning here can play out in your own writing. To see an example of an essay using this approach, see the AI-generated model on John Donne’s poem, “The Canonization,” along with my annotations on the essay. This exercise will show you how artificial intelligence can serve as a starting point, but it also showcases the limitations of tools like ChatGPT.
Slide Four: Limitations of New Criticism
While New Criticism is certainly an important step in development of modern critical theories, there are also several limitations to this approach. First, this type of criticism assumes that the text is universal—that it has one universal meaning. For example, maybe you had to read The Great Gatsby in high school. I love this book. And I still remember the multiple choice test I took on it where there was one right answer to the question about what the green light at the end of the dock symbolized. If you’ve ever taken a multiple choice test on a poem or a book, chances are your teacher took a New Criticism approach. Remember again that the goal is to find empirical and scientific ways to evaluate literature. That means we have to be able to find the “right” answer.
A second rather obvious limitation is something that we all know intuitively: how the text affects you, the individual reader, DOES matter! With New Criticism, because the text is all we need to understand the text, we don’t take individual readers or their different experiences into account. But we never read the same text the same way twice. Think about a book you’ve read more than once over the course of your life. Because you are not the same person when you reread the book, your experience of reading it will inevitably be different. Or think about our responses to Natasha Tretheway’s “Theories of Time and Space.” Many readers think this poem is hopeful, and you can certainly support that reading with evidence from the text. Other readers, myself included, think the poem is melancholy—that it’s basically about death. That reading is also supported by the text. How you read this—or any—text will depend on your individual experiences.
Ultimately, both of these concerns reveal a flaw in this empirical, scientific approach to literature. In the homogenous literary culture that existed in the 1920s-1950s, the same people were writing literature, reading literature, teaching literature, and evaluating literature. In Western societies, those people happened to be white men. This does not mean that ANY of the literature produced during this period isn’t amazing. It is! I love T.S. Eliot and Archibald MacLeish. But you can see how it’s much easier to find universal meaning when you’re in a closed circle of people who all were educated in the same way, read the same types of books, and are now teaching others the things they learned. When we talk about exploding the canon, this is what we mean. By allowing new voices to enter these literary spaces, it’s no longer quite so easy to find a universal meaning in every text. These limitations ultimately led to the development of several other critical theories we will learn about in this course.
Slide Five: Terms to Use
This slide has a list of terms you should incorporate as you practice New Criticism. I expect to see these in your theoretical response. Some of these terms will feel familiar, and some might be new. I think you’re familiar with voice, speaker, tone, point of view. Using speaker or narrator instead of the author’s name might be new to you though. It’s a hallmark of this type of criticism. Instead of talking about what the author intended, we talk about how the text functions.
Imagery and figures of speech will be important to comment on, including metaphor. Diction includes things like alliteration or onomatopoeia as well as rhyme, both internal and final. For opposition, look for opposites in the text and how they work. Ambiguity is an uncertain or unclear part of the text that may be open to multiple interpretations. Paradox is something that seems impossible: Again, how can a poem be mute? All these complexities, these oppositions, tensions, ambiguities, and paradoxes are going to lead to unity. That’s the overarching theme of the work. We’re first looking for complexity—literature shouldn’t be easy, right? Then we’re considering how those complexities in the text create unity.
Slide Six: New Criticism Checklist
As you prepare to complete your own New Criticism analysis, here’s a checklist for you to help you. What complexities can you find in the work? That’s the first thing you need to look for. What idea unifies the work? How are those tensions and ambiguities resolved? It’s super important to use details or images from the text to support your responses to this question. Finally, how do the parts of the work support that whole?
As you look at this checklist, your next step is to think about the poem you’ve decided to work with for your first essay. You’ll find these poems posted in Blackboard. Don’t do all three poems, just choose one, and then ask yourself the questions on this checklist. Those are the next steps to start applying criticism to the poem that you’ve chosen. On our final slide, I’ll give you a chance to brainstorm some ideas.
You also need to complete your theoretical response. Your initial response is due on Thursday, and your follow up post is due on Sunday. Follow the instructions for the theoretical response. I want you to practice writing a mini essay with a thesis statement that makes an argument about the text and is supported by evidence.
Slide Seven: Essay One Close Reading Activity
For this activity, use the poem you have decided to work with for your first essay. Answer these questions, then start to think about how you can formulate a thesis. Remember that summary is not analysis. You should not tell me what the poem says or what the symbols and imagery are. Instead, you’ll make an argument about how these elements function in the poem to support its meaning. Reach out if you have questions or need help.
