The New Criticism theory

The New Criticism theory

The New Criticism is an American critical theory that stresses the importance of reading written text, as an independent and complete work of art. It emphasizes on reading literary works as a complete art. In the past decades, there were different ways of analyzing critical texts, such as considering the primacy of the literary scripts. New Criticism is different from other schools of criticism, such as impressionist criticism, human movement, the Marxists, and the naturalists. The advancement of this theory later established criticism as a discipline on its own. Different from traditional literary criticism, the New Criticism theory purports that literary texts are complete in and of themselves. Criticism helps to maintain and advance in language and poetry, mostly used to study poetry works and other genres in literature. The structure and meaning of literary works are closely tied, and they have to be read closely to get out the literal and contextual meaning. The New Criticism insists on four major doctrines including formalism, a close reading of texts, the contextual weight of literary works, and the non-historical context in literary works.

Formalism in literary works is inevitable in New Criticism with a structure of significance and a symbol of human experience. The human experience is captured in words and the aspect of time and history is not valued, thus the literary work connects people and the writer in the text. New Criticism urges readers to develop a broader scope of the literary text, rather than quoting the time in the history of every human experience. This claim means that texts are autonomous and closed, and so everything needed by the reader is present within it. Background information, such as the author’s biography is less connected to the literary work at hand, therefore the focus is on the literary devices employed.

The New Criticism emphasized their attention on the close reading of literary works, which focused on sentence structures and their meaning. The main concern in close reading is the number of interpretation, or meaning that can be derived from any literary work. The ambiguities that are within the texts and the undercurrents of tone, as one reads through texts to obtain the right message (Peter 10). Getting the form of the texts in terms of rhythm, especially in poems is very important, and connectedness of the information expressed is then determined. Finally, the overall devices are merged to obtain the right message in the intended manner and form. If the text is part of a bigger literary work, intertextuality, comparisons are made. The message from one paragraph is compared with the preceding one to decode the complete information from the text sequentially. The subtexts may at times correlate, for example, a new poem may be a response to an older one.

Additionally, New Criticism calls for contextual weight in a text, which means that the underlying meaning of literary works must be unfolded, unlike the personal understanding of a text. This process involves exploring the text and critically reflecting on deeper its meaning, which requires the ability to unmask the dynamics embedded in authoritative interpretations (Peter 16). Philosophical thoughts are employed to obtain linear information from multi-faceted data. Any literary work can have multiple interpretations, some different from the author, therefore the reader is free to derive as many interpretations for the same piece of text.

New Critics believe that no historical information is needed while obtaining meaning from a literary text. While they do not entirely discard the background information, the meaning out of any text can be understood without unnecessary digging into the nature of the information or the author of the text. The social context around the text is not a major factor while understanding it, and neither is the cultural aspect because the meaning is obtained from the text itself and not the history behind it. No attention is paid to the author’s intention, or his authority or whether he considered the reader’s psychology. The theory assumes that the reader is an active agent and can obtain the meaning from the text.

Iser established his criticism on the beginning theory by focusing on “intentional concept correlative,” where he formulated that the text’s sentence sequence does not portray its outside reality. Instead, its complexities lead to the emergence of a certain world, which is dispensed in it (Wolfgang 277). According to this claim, the text’s audience takes part in the bridging of the text’s complex sentences. He further explained that a text aims to develop an expectation in the audience, rather than the real event that will occur. This expectation further developed as the text’s progress, in the absence of this practice, a literary work creates boredom as a result of the limitation of imagination’s functioning (Wolfgang 278). Generally, Iser’s criticism shows that during a reading, the virtual extent is presented by the text, a sign of imagination’s and text’s association.

Moreover, he further claimed that reading has two major characteristics, which are; it is not a linear and permanent event, where the audience get difficulties when integrating brief text in a short period (Wolfgang 280). Therefore, it limits the passage of the text’s world to the audience due to limited time, which reduces the interaction level between sentences and memory. Since the readers will be left without an adequate understanding of literary works, they will try to bring their past, present, and future reflection of the presented raw information. These changes among the readers are brought by their dynamic reading nature resulting from their texts’ understanding.

Also, the issue of consistency is used by Iser to provide criticism on the beginning theory. When an insufficient connection between sentences characterizes a text, the audience attempts to seek consistency (Wolfgang 283).  The literary work does not provide this aspect, but rather it is brought about by the readers’ continuous reading. In this case, the theory is criticized due to the resultant consistency, which is brought by associating peoples’ mind and the written text with their interpretation, therefore making it have some effects. First, it enables people to measure their degree of interpretation level, leading to a better understanding of themselves and the presented material.

Furthermore, literary work’s polysemantic’ nature and the readers’ illusions are viewed by Iser to be conflicting. During a reading, there is a need for both the presence of illusion and the text, however if they are removed, the sentence becomes foreign, while the elimination of illusion will cause polysemantic to have partial denotation. This imbalance requires the presence of both characters in the literary work. Besides, the polysemantic’ changing nature leads to reading imbalance, which gains stability when the reader attempts to create the illusions’ latent disruption. This theory, therefore is criticized, as a result of the action that requires the reader to perform a balancing activity that swings between foreign and consistency interactions. When checking the balance, people begin with some expectations that are found at the centre of the experienced aesthetic. The process develops a coherent and consistent denotation that is motivated by the unwritten literary work (Wolfgang 287). The realness of the text results from the dynamic audience perspective, leading to absorption of foreign encounters in their world.

There is a form of retrospection and prediction during the association of the literary work and the audience, making the text to be viewed as a living occurrence (Wolfgang 290). This situation implies that when people are reading, it is assumed that they already have full information about what is being talked about in the text. In this case, the literary work’s purpose is to declare readers’ truth, where it will agree or oppose their ideas. If it is not affirmed, the readers are forced to align themselves with the text’s idea and concentrate so that they can gain more experience (Wolfgang 291). For Iser, reading is determined by how individuals obtain the experience, therefore the moment their assumptions are declared invalid, they are forced to enter into the text’s world.

In conclusion, New Criticism is an American critical theory that stresses the importance of reading written text. In this case, the reader has to study the text ton to gain a new experience. The theory, therefore assumes that before the reading process, the audience does not have any background information about the literary work’s content. In contrast, Iser’s criticism on the beginning theory suggests that there is a suspension of personal principles, such as attitudes and ideas among the text’s audience purposed to understand the full foreign assumptions of the literary work. This situation means that during the reading process, the audience is the main subjects, but not the author, who are required to think, despite that the main ideas are found in the text.