MEG 5 – Literary Criticism Block-4 New Criticism Complete Notes From each unit with Exam questions from old question papers
1. What are the common features of the critics associated with 'New criticism' ?
2. Bring out the features of New Criticism.
3. New criticism' emphasizes the text, not the background. Comment.
4. Comment on the beginnings in new historicism in literary criticism.
5. How does the New Criticism make use of the model of 'practical criticism' initiated by I.A. Richards?
6. Evaluate I.A. Richards's contribution to literary criticism.
7. Comment briefly on any four obstacles to proper response that I.A. Richards catalogues in Practical Criticism.
8. Assess two of the seminal critical concepts formulated by T.S. Eliot.
9. What does T. S. Eliot mean by ‘The dissociation of sensibility’ ?
10. What does Ransom mean when he advocates Criticism.
11. What according to John Crowe Ransom is the role of the literary critic in the modern world ? Explain
12. . The 'truth which the poet utters' according to Cleanth Brooks, 'can be approached only in terms of paradox'. Do you agree ? Supply reasons for your answer.
13. What according to John Crowe Ransom are the "duties" of a critic ? Explain.
14. Discuss the ideas expressed by Cleanth Brooks in his essay "Irony as a Principle of Structure".
15. Evaluate Cleanth Brooks as a New Critic.
16. What is meant by 'intentional fallacy? How would you respond to this concept of the New Critics? Critically examine Wimsatt's concept of "The Intentional Fallacy".
17. What do you understand by 'The Affective Fallacy ' ? (W.K wimsatt)
18. Briefly explain 'The intentional fallacy' and `The affective fallacy'.
19. What according to Matthew Arnold is the function of criticism ? Elucidate.
UNIT 1: I. A. RICHARD
1. - Comment briefly on any four obstacles to proper response that I.A. Richards catalogues in Practical Criticism.
- How does the New Criticism make use of the model of 'practical criticism' initiated by I.A. Richards?
3 Evaluate I.A. Richards's contribution to literary criticism.
1.A.Richards and T.S.Eliot are considered the "fathers" of New Criticism.
In his book The New Criticism (1941), John Crowe Ransom begins his chapter on Richards by saying, "Discussion of The New Criticism must start with Mr Richards. The Nav Criticism very nearly began with him.
POSITIVIST CRITICISM –
Philosophy first formulated in work of French philosopher Auguste Comte- Cours de Philosophie Positive(1830-1842).
Object – to extend to humanities, methods & principles of natural sciences.
concerned with perceptible facts rather than ideas, how these facts arise, not why
1.A.RICHARDS: HIS LIFE AND WORKS
I(vor) A(rmstrong) Richards (1893-1979), in Cambridge studied philosophy
Richards was a scholar of semantics, and along with C.K. Ogden, formulated Basic English. The Meaning of Meaning (1923) written with C.K. Ogdcn, is an important contribution to linguistics. Principles of Literary Criticism published in 1924, was followed by Science and Poetry (1926), Practical Criticism (1929), and Coleridge on Imagination (1934)
PRlNCIPLES OF LITERARY CRITICISM
to establish a theoretical framework for criticism which would free it from subjectivity and emotionalism.
no answer to the central question of criticism: "What is the value of the arts, . . and what is their place in the system of human endeavours?" Richards proposes a psychological theory of art; art is valuable because it helps to order our impulses
Art not something far from daily endeavours, it’s not something out of world.
Kant, rests on the assumption that there is a special kind of pleasure which is disinterested, universal, unintellectual and not to be confused with the pleasures of sense or ordinary emotions. They believed that art experience was a special kind of experience, in a class of its own, not to be compared with the experiences of ordinary life. Richards feels that there is no such special mode. The aesthetic experience is not a new or different kind of thing; it is similar to ordinary experiences. Richards uses a very graphic analogy to explain this point: "When we look at a picture, or read a poem, or listen to music, we are not doing something quite unlike what we were doing on our way to the gallery or when we dressed in the morning " (p. 10). He mentions ordinary activities like putting on clothes or walking down to an art gallery, to emphasize his point that art experience is not of a fundamentally different kind; art experience is more complex, and more unified. Those who believe in a special aesthetic state would postulate a peculiar unique value for it. It is possible to analyze art experience, and examine its value in terms of ordinary life, because it is not a special state cut off from ordinary life.
You can’t depend on Poet’s mind or thought process While he was writing it, to figure out what the poem is supposed to mean.
Richards believes that the mental processes of the poet are not a very profitable field for investigation. It is dangerous to try to analyze the inner workings of the artist's mind by the evidence of his artistic work. It is not possible to verifjr what went on in the artist's mind, just as we cannot be sure what goes on ln a dreamer's mind. Very often, the most plausible explanations of the artist'q mental processes may be quite wrong.
Richards takes up Coleridge's famous poem, Kubla Khan. Coleridge wrote it yder the influence of opium. Critics like Graves have presented a complex psychologcal explanation for the sources of the imagery in the poem. Richards points out that the explanation is much simpler: Coleridge was influenced by Milton. Richards examines lines 223-283 from Paradise Lost, Book IV. He quotes many lines from Milton's poem to establish it as the source of the underground river, the fountain, and the Abyssinian maid "singing of Mount Abora" of Coleridge's poem. Richards brings up this example to show the difficulties of speculating about the poet's mental processes; he feels that it would be a wrong application of psycholdgy.
Richards believes that "Art for Art's sake" is wrong.
Richards was one of the first to indicate the importance of the response of the audience.
His theory and how its limitations:
"The arts are our storehouse of recorded values" (p.22). He gives a very high place to the artist. "He is the point at which the growth of the mind shows itself'. Richards has proposed a very simplistic process, and his psychological theories have become outmoded with the passage of time. Moreover, it is difficult to accept the high claims Richards makes for art as an ordering of the mind. , "If we think of the poets there is ample evidence that Richards's view of poetry as an ordering of the mind and the making of a perfect human being is false: there were madmen, suicides, scoundrels and many hombly unhappy and disorganized men even among the great poets."
In Richard’s Book with C.K. Ogden The Meaning of Meaning (1923) created new technical terms for literary discussion. In the scientific field, the impulse should be derived from what is external. ?he scientific use of language thus relies on reference undistorted by the receiving mind. By contrast there is an emotive use of language which is designed to arouse emotions. Richards says, "A statement may be used for the sake of reference, true or false, which it causes. This is the scientific use of language.
Practical Criticism - analyses the "Four Kinds of Meaning"
1. Sense -- the state of affairs or the items presented for consideration.
2. Feeling -- By feeling he means the whole range of emotional attitudes, desire, pleasure etc. that the words evoke. Feeling does not enter into some types of discourse -- mathematics, for example.
3. Tone: the attitude of the speaker to the audience.
4. Intention -- the speaker's conscious or unconscious intention, the effect he is trying to promote.
Richards asked a sample audience in Cambridge to describe their responses to a set of thirteen poems supplied without titles or the authors' names. The students were not given any clue to the period in which the poems were written. The students were encouraged to read the poems more than once, and given one week's time to write down their comments. A selection of these comments, (which he calls "protocols") forms the substance of the book, followed by an analysis of characteristic errors and suggestions for educational reform. Richards says in his introduction that he had three objectives:
(1) to document "the contemporary state of culture",
(2) to provide a new technique for responding to poetry, and
(3)'to reform the teaching of literature.
The book Practical Criticism analyses the different mistakes of interpretation and evaluation that Richards saw in these responses, and seeks to identify their causes. He was concerned by the low level of critical competence' that was revealed, for he had chosen a set of educated Cambridge students. Let us look at the obstacles to proper response that Richards catalogues: I am following the system of numbering by alphabets used by Richards himself in Practical Criticism, (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1964, pp. 13- 17).
A. The difficulty of making out the plain sense of poetry -- a large number of readers failed to understand it, both as a statement and as an expression.
B. The difficulties of sensuous apprehension -- many readers do not appreciate the sound, the rhythm and movement of the text.
C. The problems of imagery, primarily visual imagery -- some readers have a poor imaging capacity.
D. Mnemonic irrelevancies -- the reader remembers some personal experience which is not relevant to the poem.
E. Stock Responses -- the reader may have fully prepared views and emotions, which are simply triggered off by the poem, He does not respond to the poem in question -- he already has a ready-made response.'
F. Sentimentality -- the reader may be too emotional.
G. Inhibition -- the opposite extreme to sentimentality, the reader experiences less emotion than he ought to.
H. Doctrinal Adhesions. Poetry may contain or imply certain beliefs about the world, or at least seem to contain certain views. A clash between the reader's own views, and the views he finds expressed in the poetry, are a fertile source of erratic judgement. '
I. The effects of technical presuppositions. When some poem succeeds by using a certain technique, we expect similar themes to be handled with the same technique, and do not respond when a new or different technique is used. The converse is also true -- if a technique has failed in one case, we jump to the conclusion that the technique itself is useless. Many readers make this mistake of confusing cause and effect.
J. General critical preconceptions. The reader may have preconceived notions about the nature and value of poetry. Whether these preconceptions are conscious or unconscious, they create an obstacle between the reader and the poem. He felt that readers can, and should be, trained to have the proper response.
The decline in speech and the loose use of words lie at the root of the problem. Richards suggests that the quality of communication between persons, and the level of discussion, can be raised by a "conscious and deliberate effort to master language."
A student should learn how language works, which means studying "the kinds of meaning that language handles, their connection with one another, their interferences". The student should not rest with studying the rules of syntax or grammar or lexicography. Richards believed that when we remove the obstacles in the way of the poet communicating with the reader, he will be open to the poet's mental condition and can experience the poem properly. Richards was not bothered by problems of interpretation, unlike the hermeneutical critics who are concerned with the subtle problems of correctly understanding a text.
1.7 – Achievements of Richards, in the form of his students, in the form of his theories applied later to real work after him.- ROYO
UNIT 2 T.S. ELIOT
1. Assess two of the seminal critical concepts formulated by T.S. Eliot.
2. What does T. S. Eliot mean by ‘The dissociation of sensibility’ ?
3. What according to Matthew Arnold is the function of criticism ? Elucidate. 2.2 & 2.3
Thomas Steams Eliot (1888-1965)
Work - "Tradition and the Individual Talent", the most influential essay Eliot wrote, and "The Function of Criticism", The Waste Land, Homage to John Dryden, For Lancelot Andrews: Essays on Style and Order (1928), The Sacred Wood (1920), The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1949) and On Poetry and Poets (1957), "To Criticize the Critic(lecture) was contrasted by his second lecture, where he criticised Milton. The Common Pursuit(collection of his essays)
Imp - The Dissociation of Sensibility" and "The Objective Correlative"
Awards - Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948.
The mind of the poet is a medium in which experiences can enter into new combinations. When oxygen and sulphur dioxide are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulphuric acid. This combination takes place only in the presence of platinum, which is the catalyst. But the sulphuric acid shows no trace of platinum, which remains unaffected. The catalyst facilitates the chemical change, but does not participate in it, and remains unchanged. Eliot compares the mind of the poet to the shred of platinum, which will "digest and transmute the. passions which are its material".
Eliot refutes the idea that poetry is the expression of the personality of the poet. The emotions occasioned by events in the personal life of the poet are not important. What matters is the emotion transmuted into poetry, the feelings expressed in the poetry. "Emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him"
"Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality."
He is against interpreters who can find things in the poem which are not there. He uses the metaphor of medical dissection to emphasize his point: "Comparison and analysis need only the cadavers on the table; but interpretation is always producing parts of the body from its pockets, and fixing them in place." The text is compared to the dead body on the operation table; when an interpreter puts ideas of his own making into the reading of the poem, he is compared to a doctor bringing in parts from outside when conducting a post mortem.(from Common Pursiut)
It is interesting that Eliot always worked within his own cultural space: religion meant Christianity, while literature, culture and history meant exclusively European literature, culture or history. Tradition, for Eliot, means an awareness of the history of Europe, not as dead facts but as a11 ever-changing yet changeless presence, constantly interacting subconsciously with the individual poet.
It is now generally believed that Eliot's idea of tradition is rather narrow in two respects. First, he's talking of simply the poetic tradition and neglects the fact that even the poetic tradition is a complex amalgam of written and oral poetry and the elements that go into them. It was only in later writings that he realised the fact that in the making of verse many elements are involved. In his writings on poetic drama he gives evidence of having broadened his scope.
Second, Eliot is neglecting other traditions that go into social formations. When he later wrote 'Religion and Literature', he gives more scope to non-poetic elements of tradition. On these considerations one can say that he develops his ideas on tradition T.S. Eliot throughout his literary career - right up to the time he wrote 'Notes Towards a Definition of Culture' in which tradition is more expansive than in his earlier writings.
"THE DISSOCIATION OF SENSIBILITY" AND "THE OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVE"
These phrases occur in the essays on the Metaphysical poets and Hamlet respectively, but the concepts can be found in some other essays too. On Poetry and Poets has them mentioned.
THE DISSOCIATION OF SENSIBILITY describes the perceived separation of intellectual thought and feeling in English poetry, particularly after the 17th century. Eliot argued that earlier poets, like John Donne, had a "unification of sensibility," where thought and feeling were seamlessly blended, while later poets experienced a disconnect between these two elements
In the seventeenth century, a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered." The language became more refined, but the feeling became more crude in later poets. Eliot suggested at first that this split was "aggravated by the influence of the two most powerful poets of the century, Milton and Dryden." But later he recognized that the process was much more complex. In his second essay on Milton, Eliot said that "to lay the burden on the shoulders of Milton and Dryden was a mistake." The split could not be accounted for in purely literary terms, "We must seek the causes in Europe and not in England alone." But he continued to believe in this theory of dissociation of sensibility. The trouble with English poetry is that the "greatest masters of diction in our language, Milton and Dryden, triumphed with a dazzling disregard of the soul." Critics say that we should "look into our hearts and write." But Eliot feels that easy emotionalism is not the answer, the heart alone will not do, "One must look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system , and the digestive tracts." "Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity" and the poet must become more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning. He shows how French symbolist poets such as Laforgue have turned to devices which resemble the Metaphysical conceit.
The phrase "objective correlative" was first used by T.S. Eliot in his essay on Hamlet. The phrase occurs, with a very different meaning, in the American aesthetician Washington Allston's Lectures on Art (1 850). But Eliot owes nothing to Allston -- he was not even aware that the phrase had been used. Eliot was probably influenced by George Santayana's use of "correlative objects". According to Eliot, "the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked." He gives examples of this "exact equivalence" from Shakespeare's successful plays, such as Macbeth: "you will find that the state of mind of Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep has been communicated to you by a skilful accumulation of imagined sensory impressions." Hamlet was a failure because Shakespeare had been unable to find a proper chain of events or set of words to evoke the emotions. Eliot says that in Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking scene, and in the speech that Macbeth makes when he hears of his wife's death, the words are completely adequate to the state of mind, whereas in Hamlet the T.S. Eliot prince is "dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear."
UNIT 3 F.R. LEAVIS
Frank Raymond Leavis (1895-1978) was born at Cambridge, where he spent most of his life.
Work - Mass Civilization and Minority Culture (1 930), New Bearings in English Poetry (1932), Revaluation (1936), The Great Traditi0n:George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad (1948), D.H.Lawrence: Novelist (1955), Dickens the Novelist (1970, written in collaboration with his wife Q.D.Leavis) and The Living Principle: "English" as a Discipline of Thought (1975). Nor Shall My Sword, 1970.
REVALUATION
In his introduction, Leavis tells us that the book was written as a companion piece to New Bearings in English Poetry, published four years earlier. That book described contemporary poetry. Revaluation is its complement, an account of the past of English poetry, for a "full perspective" can be provided only if the present is correlated with the past.
"the business of the critic" to see the poetry of the present as the continuation and development of the past. The poetry of the past is alive only in terms of its relevance to us, the present day readers. He plans to present the main lines of development of English poetry, from Shakespeare to Keats. Any worthwhile criticism has to be from a clearly defined point of view.
Every critical study by Leavis is full of quotations: he never makes a general statement unsupported by lines from the text.
He chose whom to count as a poet/writer and whom not to(giving reason) Dryden, a relatively simple poet, has received more attention than he deserves, but the range of Pope's poetry has not received its due, so he has a chapter on Pope. There is no chapter on Shakespeare, because Leavis feels that "Shakespeare is too large a fact to be dealt with in that way. But the book is full of recurrent references to him. There is no chapter on Spenser because his place in the tradition is clear; his influence is brought out through incidental references to him in the chapters on Milton and Keats. There are individual chapters on Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats, but none on the Victorians, because "they do not lend themselves readily to the critical method of this book." Leavis feels that the defect is not in the method but in their poetry, their verse doesn't offer, characteristically, any very interesting local life for inspection." Every chapter in Revaluation has many "Notes"; these appendices help to clarify points raised in the main essay. Thus many poets not treated in detail in the chapter (Blake, Byron and his satire, Coleridge etc.) are the objects of very interesting comments in the notes, which are sometimes small chapters in themselves.
He believes that even if the critic is wrong in his valuation, he has served the business of criticism, because he is open to correction, he has profitably participated in the debate. Criticism is "the profitable discussion of literature."
LITERARY CRITICISM AND PHILOSOPHY
The essay "Literary Criticism and Philosophy", first published in Scrutiny in 1937, was a response to Revaluation, Wellek's suggestion that Leavis should spell out the theoretical basis of his criticism. After reviewing Revaluation, the eminent critic and literary historian Wellek
A REPRESENTATIVE ESSAY: "MILTON"
Leavis supports Eliot's denunciation of Milton, and takes issue with Tate who believes that if we do not like Milton, it is because we are prejudiced against his mythology. Leavis maintains that his dislike of Milton, is based purely on his antipathy to his verse, Milton's beliefs have nothing to do with it. He criticizes the monotony of Milton's verse: "reading Paradise Lost is a matter of resisting, of standing up against, the verse movement, of subduing it into something tolerably like sensitiveness, and in the end our resistance is worn down; we surrender at last to the inescapable monotony of the ritual."
Milton does not bother about "the intrinsic nature of English", he had renounced the English language, and wrote it as if it were Latin. They use a diction remote from speech, dominated by a concern for mellifluousness. There is no pressure behind the words. Leavis repeatedly contrasts this usage with the Shakespearean use of English. He ends the essay by asserting Shakespeare's incomparable superiority
UNIT 4 JOHN CROWE RANSOM AND CLEANTH BROOKS
1. What does Ransom mean when he advocates Criticism.
2. What according to John Crowe Ransom is the role of the literary critic in the modern world ? Explain.
3. What according to John Crowe Ransom are the "duties" of a critic ? Explain.
4. . The 'truth which the poet utters' according to Cleanth Brooks, 'can be approached only in terms of paradox'. Do you agree ? Supply reasons for your answer.
5. Discuss the ideas expressed by Cleanth Brooks in his essay "Irony as a Principle of Structure".
6. Evaluate Cleanth Brooks as a New Critic.
John Crowe Ransom (1 888- 1974) -
He was a leading member of the group of writers known as the Southern Agrarians or Fugtives (after a poetry magazine The Fugitive co-founded by Ransom md Allen Tate). This group, which included Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate and Robert Pm Warren, is identified with the rise of New Criticism in America. They shared religious, political and cultural convictions of a conservative character, with a special allegiance to the American South.
As critic, poet, teacher and editor, Ransom was widely respected and influential.
Work – Criticism inc., "Poetry: A Note on Ontology" and "Criticism as Pure Speculation
"CRITICISM INC"
was first published in the Virginia Quarterly Review in 1937 . makes a strong plea for the development of literary criticism as a distinct discipline in universities. It expresses the New Critics' concept of what criticism should be--a collaborative effort in the elucidation and evaluation of literary texts, including contemporary works. He attacks other rival approaches: historical scholarship, impressionistic, emotional appreciation, and the various kinds of criticism which focus on the abstracted content of a work of literature instead of the work itself.
The essay begins by reviewing the current state of criticism: "critics nearly always have been amateurs", they feel that no special training is needed to be a literary critic. According to Ransom, the critic needs the kind of competence that three different people possess: the artist, the philosopher, and the university teacher of English. But each profession has its drawbacks. The artist's evaluation is intuitive, he cannot explain it to others; however, practitioners often make the best critics as T.S. Eliot also believed in his later writings , because they have a good command of the language. The philosopher knows the diction of the fine arts, but his theory is too general-he cannot appreciate the technical effects. He has no intimate knowledge of particular works of art, and his generalizations are drawn not from observation and study, but from other generalizations. The professors should take charge of critical activity, but they are not critical enough. They are learned men who are ready to spend a lifetime in compiling the data of literature, but they avoid making literary judgement. Ransom insists that it is the duty of the university professors to set up proper standards of criticism. Criticism should be developed by the systematic effort of learned persons, and the proper place for this is the university. (Most universities in England and America did not offer English studies as a discipline till the second quarter of the twentieth century.)
Though Ransom suggests that criticism should be made scientific, he does not mean that it can ever be an exact science. What he means is that it should be systematic, and professionals should take charge of it. Hence the title of the essay: he wants criticism to be established as a profession, "what we need is 'Criticism Inc."', "Inc.", an abbreviation for "Incorporated"
He advocates an autonomous school of English studies; it should not be a branch of the department of history, or of the department of ethics. It is wrong to think that just anybody, without specific training, can be a critic. He gives examples from other fields: in economics, chemistry, sociology, theology or architecture, criticism of the performance is in the hands of men who have had formal training in its theory and technique. Literary criticism, too, should be a specialized discipline
In the third section of the essay, he considers what the duties of a critic should be. Departments of English have to communicate the understanding of literature, but professors should not content themselves with just reading the text well, hoping that the students will somehow learn to appreciate it. A teacher who stops with exposing students to the text is compared to the curator of a museum, who shows works of art to an audience.
He proceeds by explaining "what criticism is not". He presents a list of six items which he considers to be not literary criticism:
1- Personal registration. Describing the effect of the work of art on the reader cannot be considered literary criticism. Criticism should be concerned with describing "the nature of the object rather than its effects on the subject" To say that the reader is moved to tears is not an analysis of the text.
2- Synopsis and paraphrase. Discussing the synopsis of a novel or the prose paraphrase of a poem does not amount to literary criticism.
3- Historical studies. Understanding the general literary background, the author's biography, autobiographical evidence, bibliographical items, and knowledge of the literary originals can all be useful aids to literary criticism, but they do not constitute it.
4- Linguistic studies. Studies concerned with meaning of words and idioms ensure that criticism is based on proper understanding of the text. But linguistic studies alone cannot produce a critic.
5- 5. Moral studies. Individual readers will apply their own moral standards; it may be the Christian ethic, it may be Aristotelian, or Marxist. But the moral content should not be taken as the whole content of the work. Criticism is concerned with the whole content.
6- 6. Any other special studies. Various departments can find relevant material in literature: works can be written from the point of view of sociology, geography, law etc. Discussions of Milton's geography, or Shakespeare's understanding of the law, do not constitute literary criticism. It can be considered literary criticism only when the critic discusses the creative writer's literary assimilation of material pertaining to other disciplines, he can analyse how .Milton's or Shakespeare's knowledge of geography or law has become part of his poetry.
The good critic is not content with just listing the separate devices, he discusses their function.
CLEANTH BROOKS(1906 to 1994) –
Work - work is the collection of critical essays, The Well- Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947), Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939), William Faulkner: the Yoknapatawpha Country (1963), Understanding Poetry (1938), Understanding Fiction (1943), Literary Criticism: a Short History (1957), "Irony and Ironic Poetry"(article in 1951), "The Language of Paradox, The Well- Wrought Urn
Brooks never indulges in generalities, but works only through concrete examples.
The poet does not begin with an abstract theme; the only valid method is to start with individual details, and then work towards general meaning.
Brooks uses a memorable simile, that of a kite flying. The long tail of the kite, though it adds to the weight of the kite, gives it stability and direction. He compares the kite to the universal meaning, and the tail to the particular details which weigh it down. Just as the kite's flight would be without direction without the tail, the poet can say things only through metaphor. Direct statement leads to abstraction, and "takes us out of poetry altogether".
The elements in a poem are the different parts of a plant, such as the roots, the stalk and the leaves which produce a beautiful flower. The elements are not separate beautiful things, like the flowers in a bouquet. You can make a bouquet by placing together different beautiful flowers, side by side. But a finished poem is the flower itself, produced by the interaction of different elements. Another simile he uses is that of drama; "the poem is like a little drama". The total effect of a drama is the result of the combination of the different elements in it -- the different characters, lines, dramatic movements on the stage etc. Just as there are no superfluous actors in a good play, a good poem has no unnecessary lines.
Brooks feels that there can be no statement which does not employ irony, if we use irony to mean the modifying force of the context. Perhaps only statements of a science ( like mathematics, "Two plus two equals four" or the Pythagoras Theorem (about the properties of a right-angled triangle) are unqualified by any context, they are true no matter where they occur.
Brooks declares, "poems never contain abstract statements." Any statements made in a poem should be read as if it were a speech in a drama, the context is all important. The importance of the context is a very important aspect of poetry.
He observes that the formalist critic (by which he means the New Critic) makes two assumptions:
(1) the author's intention as realized is the "intonation" that counts. And
(2) the formalist critic assumes an ideal reader, that is, instead of focusing on a range of possible readings, he attempts to find a central point of reference from which he can focus on the work itself.
In answer to the objection that there is no ideal reader, Cleanth Brooks grants that "there is no ideal reader, of course." But he defends the New Critic by saying that it is "a defensible strategy" adopted by all critics for the purpose of focusing on the poem instead of his own reactions. Laying stress on the reader means that "we move from literary criticism into socio-psychology". He sums up their avoidance of the intentional fallacy and the affective fallacy in these words: "The reduction of a work of literature to its causes does not constitute literary criticism, nor does an estimate of its effects
Unit-5 W.K.Wimsatt
1. What is meant by 'intentional fallacy? How would you respond to this concept of the New Critics? Critically examine Wimsatt's concept of "The Intentional Fallacy".
2. What do you understand by 'The Affective Fallacy ' ? (W.K wimsatt)
3. Briefly explain 'The intentional fallacy' and `The affective fallacy'.
William K Vimsatt (1907-1975)
Work The Prose Style of Samuel Johnson, . The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (1954) and Hateful Contraries: Studies in Literature and Criticism, The Portraits of Alexander Pope,, Literary Criticism: a Short History.
The two essays, "The Intentional Fallacy" and "The Affective Fallacy", were written in collaboration with Monroe C. Beardsley. Beardsley
THE INTENTIONAL FALLACY
early twentieth century critics believed that in order to judge the poet's performance, we must know what he intended. They feel that we must evaluate the work of art by seeing whether the artist achieved his intention. This school of thought has been challenged by the New Critics, who argued that the artistic intentions of the creator are not relevant when judging a work of art.
Wimsatt and Beardsley had argued that "the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art." The essay, "The Intentional Fallacy", (first published in 1946 in The Sewanee Review), works out the full implications of this statement. The critic's view of authorial intention has an effect on every aspect of literary criticism. By intention is meant "the design or plan in the author's mind", and the author's "attitude towards his work, the way he felt, what made him write."
There are five points in Essay Intentional fallacy:
1. Wimsatt admits that a poem does not come into existence by accident or by itself. The words are written by the poet, his intentions have brought the poem into being, they can be considered the cause of the poem; but the intention cannot be the standard by which the critic judges the poem.
2. Moreover, there are practical difficulties in the critic determining the poet's intentions. "How is he to find out what the poet tried to do?" The poem is the only evidence before us. If the poet succeeded in doing it, the poem itself shows what he was trying to do. If the poet did not succeed, it is absurd for the critic to look outside the poem for an intention which is not effective in the poem. The critic should not go to other sources to find out what the writer wanted to say.
3. Wimsatt and Beardsley make a categorical declaration of the New Critic's stance on literary appreciation: they give a great deal of importance to judgement. As they put it, "Judging a poem is like judging a pudding. One demands that it work." Just as we do not enquire about the intention of it cook, what kind of pudding he had in mind,it is irrelevant to enquire into what kind of poem the author wanted to write. It is only because an artifact works that we can infer the intention of its creator. "A poem should not mean but be"
4. A poem can be about a state of mind or a personality rather than a physical object like an apple. But this personality, these thoughts and attitudes belong to the character, "the dramatic speaker", not to the author. W.K. Wimsatt
5. An author may improve his work by revision. But we cannot say that he has achieved his intention better, because he has written a better poem; his former intention was expressed in the earlier version. The revised version would be expressing a different intention, for we cannot look for the intention as something outside the poem.
use of evidence for understanding the meaning of a poem. Evidence can be of three types:
(1) Internal evidence for understanding a poem is knowledge which is in the public sphere: knowledge discovered through the semantics (the meaning of the words) and the syntax (the order of the words) of a poem.
(2) External evidence is private, and not part of the poem. It consists of revelations, in journals or letters or reported conversations, about how or why the poet wrote the poem.
(3) An intermediate kind of evidence about the character of the author or about private or semi-private meanings attached to words or topics by an author or the coterie of which he is a member.
THE AFFECTIVE FALLACY
"The Affective Fallacy", first published in 1949, presents a theoretical formulation of another aspect of the New Critics' attempt to objectively focus on the work itself they feel that the critic should not be concerned with the emotional effect of the work on the reader. The affective fallacy, like the intentional fallacy, is another obstacle to objective criticism. The intentional fallacy represented a confusion between the poem and its origin, the mistaken attempt to judge a poem by its causes.
The affective fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its results. The intentional fallacy tried to derive its standards of judgment from the poet; the affective fallacy tries to derive its standards from the psychological effects of the poem, and ends in impressionism and relativism. The outcome of both fallacies is that attention is deflected from the poem itself.
If emotional response is independent of the cognitive quality of the context, a reader can feel either "hot" or "cold", report either "good" or "bad" on reading either "liberty" or "licence", either an ode by Keats or a limerick.
Richards has anticipated some of the problems of affective criticism by saying that it is not intensity of emotion that characterizes poetry, but the subtle quality of patterned emotion. Richards' theory of balanced emotions has contributed much to recent schools of cognitive analysis, or paradox. ambiguity, irony and symbol.
UNIT 6 CONCLUSION
THE ACHIEVEMENT OF THE NEW CRITICS
the New Critics shared some basic assumptions. They all believed that a literary work was primarily a linguistic artifact, a verbal structure. It was a mode of communication between the artist and the reader. The primary function of the critic, they believed, is to understand and judge the poem, unaffected by the intentional fallacy or the affective fallacy. They believed in the supremacy and autonomy of the words on the page, the text. They believed that a work of art has an independent existence, but art is not divorced from life, they did not subscribe to the beliefs of the "Art for Art's sake school". Most of the New Critics were concerned with man and civilization, though their interpretation of "value" is not identical. For them, the exploration of literature was an exploration of life. The function of criticism is to see ‘the object as in itself it really is’
power" of the imagination, which has the creative capacity to reconcile opposites. They were all concerned with the structure of the work of literature as part of its total meaning, for they do not accept any dichotomy between content and form. The New Critics considered judgement a very important element of literary criticism. Through textual analysis, these critics have illuminated and judged literary works, and discussed the established canon.
There are a few inherent drawbacks in the methodology of the New Critics. It is not very conducive to the study of fiction. The New Critics have produced many brilliant critical essays on poetry, but fiction studies lag behind. The exception is Leavis, whose criticism of fiction is as good as, if not better than, his studies of poetry.
The New Critics pay insufficient attention to the problems of interpretations and audience response. They assume that a literary work has just one meaning for all time. As Eliot puts it: The first danger is that of assuming that there must be just one interpretation of the poem as a whole, that must be right. . . the meaning of the poem as a whole is not exhausted by any explanation, for the meaning is what the poem means to different sensitive readers. Critics of the school of interpretation (hermeneutics) and "Reader Oriented Theories" have analysed these problems with great subtlety.
All –
1. Comment on the beginnings in new historicism in literary criticism.
2. What are the common features of the critics associated with 'New criticism' ?
3. Bring out the features of New Criticism.
4. New criticism' emphasizes the text, not the background. Comment.
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