Chapter 5: New Criticism

According to Tyson, (1999) New Criticism is not so new anymore, in fact, she reports that it’s “no longer practiced by literary critics” (p. 117). New Criticism replaced the biographical historical criticism that dominated literary studies in the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth century. The theory rose to prominence in literary studies from 1940s through the 1960s and has since left an enduring influence on the way we read and write about literature. This theoretical framework continues to have an influence how we approach literary studies; consequently, we should be aware of the contribution and understand those theories that have since developed in reaction against it, namely structuralism and deconstructive criticism that will be covered in subsequent summaries. .
The focus of New Critical effort was “The text itself” as opposed to the writer’s personal and intellectual life as was the focus prior. This shift in attention was significant, no longer was the intent of the author the focus, instead, it was the text itself – “how a literary text means is inseparable from what it means” (p. 120). In this, we examine grammatical elements, choice of words (nouns, adjectives, verbs) and sentence structure to create the work’s “organic unity – the working together of all the parts to make an inseparable whole – is the criterion by which New Critics judged the quality of a literary work” (p. 121). If we change one word, or translate it is to create a new different work, this is to commit the “heresy of paraphrase”.
As Tyson explains, “literary language depends on connotation: on the implication, association, suggestion, and evocation of meaning and of shades of meaning. Thus, for New Criticism, the complexity of a text is created by the multiple and often conflicting meanings woven through it. Moreover, these meanings are a product primarily of four kinds of linguistic devices: paradox, irony, ambiguity, and tension. A paradox is a statement, proposition, or situation that seems to be absurd or contradictory, but in fact is or may be true. She sights the biblical paradox that you must lose your life in order to gain it as an example. She explains “on the surface, the phrase seems self-contradictory: how do you gain an object by losing it? However, the phrase means that by giving up one kind of life, the transitory life of the flesh, you gain another, more important kind of life: the eternal life of the soul” (p. 121). Irony is something that happens that is incongruous with what might be expected to happen, especially when this seems absurd or laughable. For example, In Shakespeare’s tragic play Othello, the title character repeatedly describes treacherous Iago as “honest.” Misled by Iago’s lies, Othello becomes convinced that his innocent wife is dishonest. Othello recognizes Iago’s deceptions only at the tragic conclusion of the play. Ambiguity occurs when a situation in which something can be understood in more than one way and it is not clear which meaning is intended. The example used by Tyson is Tony Morrison’s Beloved (1987) the image of the tree produced by the scar tissue on Sethe’s back implies, among other things, suffering (the “tree” resulted from a brutal whipping, which is emblematic of all the hardship experienced under slavery), endurance (trees can live for hundreds of years, and the scar tissue, itself, testifies to Sethe’s remarkable ability to survive the most traumatic experiences), and renewal (like the trees that lose their lives in the fall and are “reborn” every spring, Sethe is offered, at the novels close, the chance to make a new life) (p. 122). Finally, tension, is the way that opposing elements or characters clash or interact interestingly with each other in a literary work. “For example, in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949), the concrete image of Willy’s tiny house, bathed in blue light and surrounded by enormous apartment buildings that emanate an angry orange glow, embodies the general idea of the underdog, the victim of forces larger and more numerous than itself.
New Criticism requires us to take a close look at formal elements of the text to help us discover the theme and explain the ways in which those formal elements establish it. For New critics, this is the only way to determine the texts value. By staying within the text in this manner allows us to provide the context within which we interpret and evaluate the work.