Core Principles and Assumptions of New Criticism
New Criticism treats a literary work as a self-contained object. Instead of asking who wrote it or when was it written, you ask: what does the text itself do? All meaning lives on the page, and your job is to find it through careful, close reading.
This approach dominated American literary criticism from roughly the 1930s through the 1960s. Key figures include John Crowe Ransom (who coined the term "New Criticism"), Cleanth Brooks, W.K. Wimsatt, and Monroe Beardsley. Understanding its principles gives you a foundation for nearly every other critical method you'll encounter in this course, since many later theories define themselves against New Criticism.
Core Principles
- The text is autonomous. A poem or novel is a self-sufficient structure of meaning. You don't need the author's diary or a history textbook to interpret it. For example, you'd analyze the imagery and symbolism in a Keats ode without researching his tuberculosis diagnosis.
- Literature contains universal truths. New Critics assumed that great works speak across time periods. Themes like love, loss, and ambition in Shakespeare's sonnets aren't locked in the Elizabethan era; they resonate with any reader who reads carefully.
- Organic unity. Every element of a text (form, style, diction, imagery, theme) works together as a whole. Nothing is accidental or decorative. If a poem uses an irregular meter, that irregularity means something. You'd examine how a sonnet's rhyme scheme and volta reinforce its emotional arc, not treat form and content as separate concerns.
Emphasis on Close Reading
Close reading is the central method of New Criticism. It means slowing down to analyze a text line by line, paying attention to how literary devices create meaning.
What you're looking for in a close reading:
- Literary devices: imagery, symbolism, irony, paradox, ambiguity, tension. For instance, tracking patterns of light and dark imagery in a short story can reveal the protagonist's internal conflict.
- Formal elements: structure, syntax, meter, rhyme, point of view. Studying the stream-of-consciousness narration in a modernist novel, for example, is just as important as studying its plot.
- How parts relate to the whole: every detail should connect back to the work's larger meaning.
Close reading also recognizes that a text can support multiple valid interpretations. Two students might offer different readings of a story's ambiguous ending, and both can be right, as long as each interpretation is grounded in textual evidence.
The Intentional Fallacy and the Affective Fallacy
Two concepts from Wimsatt and Beardsley are central here:
The Intentional Fallacy is the error of judging a work based on what the author meant to say. New Critics argue that the author's stated purpose is irrelevant. If a poet says her poem is about grief, but the language and imagery on the page suggest something more complex, you go with the text. The poem means what it does, not what the author intended.
The Affective Fallacy is the error of judging a work based on its emotional effects on the reader. How a poem makes you feel is not the same as what it means. New Critics wanted to keep analysis grounded in the text rather than in subjective emotional responses.
New Criticism vs. Other Theories
Understanding what New Criticism excludes helps clarify what it values:
- Biographical criticism looks at the author's life to explain the work. A biographical critic might examine how Hemingway's World War I experiences shaped A Farewell to Arms. A New Critic would set that aside and focus on the novel's prose style, imagery, and structure.
- Historical criticism examines the social and political context of a work's production, like analyzing how the Great Depression influenced Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. New Criticism treats that context as external to the text.
- Reader-response theory foregrounds the reader's role in making meaning, including subjective and personal reactions. New Criticism resists this, insisting meaning is in the text, not in the reader.
- Structuralism shares New Criticism's interest in textual patterns but looks for universal underlying structures across many texts (like binary oppositions in folktales), while New Criticism focuses on the individual work's unique internal coherence.
Applying New Critical Methods
Close reading a poem:
- Identify the formal elements: rhyme scheme, meter, line breaks, stanza structure. Note anything unusual, like enjambment or a disrupted rhyme pattern.
- Catalog the literary devices: metaphor, simile, irony, paradox, alliteration, assonance.
- Ask how these formal and figurative elements work together. For example, if a sonnet's meter becomes irregular in the third quatrain, consider how that irregularity mirrors the speaker's emotional turmoil.
- Build an interpretation of the poem's meaning that accounts for as many textual details as possible.
Analyzing a short story or novel:
- Identify central themes (e.g., loss of innocence, the tension between appearance and reality).
- Examine how structure supports those themes. A non-linear narrative, for instance, might emphasize the theme of fragmented memory.
- Analyze point of view, characterization, and dialogue as formal choices that shape meaning.
- Identify recurring symbols and motifs. The green light in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby connects to the theme of desire and the American Dream not because Fitzgerald said so in a letter, but because the text repeatedly positions it that way through Gatsby's gaze, its physical distance across the water, and its reappearance at key moments.
The through-line in all of this: stay on the page. Your evidence comes from the text, your argument is about the text, and your conclusion is about what the text does with its own language and form.