New Criticism

History

New Criticism developed in the 1920s-30s and peaked in the 1940s-50s. The movement is named after John Crowe Ransom's 1941 book The New Criticism. New Critics treat a work of literature as if it were self-contained. They do not consider the reader's response, author's intention, or historical and cultural contexts. New Critics perform a close reading of the text, and believe the structure and meaning of the text should not be examined separately. New Critics especially appreciate the use of literary devices in a text. The New Criticism has sometimes been called an objective approach to literature.^{[citation needed]}

The notion of ambiguity is an important concept within New Criticism; several prominent New Critics have been enamored above all else with the way that a text can display multiple simultaneous meanings. In the 1930s, I. A. Richards borrowed Sigmund Freud's term "overdetermination" (which Louis Althusser would later revive in Marxist political theory) to refer to the multiple meanings which he believed were always simultaneously present in language. To Richards, claiming that a work has "One And Only One True Meaning" is an act of superstition (The Philosophy of Rhetoric, 39).

In 1954, William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley published an essay entitled "The intentional fallacy", in which they argued strongly against any discussion of an author's intention, or "intended meaning." For Wimsatt and Beardsley, the words on the page were all that mattered; importation of meanings from outside the text was quite irrelevant, and potentially distracting. This became a central tenet of the second generation of New Criticism.

On the other side of the page, so to speak, Wimsatt proposed an "affective fallacy", discounting the reader's peculiar reaction (or violence of reaction) as a valid measure of a text ("what it is" vs. "what it does"). This has wide-ranging implications, going back to the catharsis and cathexis of the Ancient Greeks, but also serves to exclude trivial but deeply affective advertisements and propaganda from the artistic canon.

Taken together, these fallacies might compel one to refer to a text and its functioning as an autonomous entity, intimate with but independent of both author and reader. This reflects the earlier attitude of Russian formalism and its attempt to describe poetry in mechanistic and then organic terms. (Both schools of thought might be said to anticipate the 21st century interest in electronic artificial intelligence, and perhaps lead researchers in that field to underestimate the difficulty of that undertaking.)

Formalism

Formalism is a school of literary criticism and literary theory having mainly to do with structural purposes of a particular text.

In literary theory, formalism refers to critical approaches that analyze, interpret, or evaluate the inherent features of a text. These features include not only grammar and syntax but also literary devices such as meter and tropes. The formalist approach reduces the importance of a text’s historical, biographical, and cultural context.

Formalism rose to prominence in the early twentieth century as a reaction against Romanticist theories of literature, which centered on the artist and individual creative genius, and instead placed the text itself back into the spotlight, to show how the text was indebted to forms and other works that had preceded it. Two schools of formalist literary criticism developed, Russian formalism, and soon after Anglo-American New Criticism. Formalism was the dominant mode of academic literary study in the US at least from the end of the Second World War through the 1970s, especially as embodied in René Wellek and Austin Warren's Theory of Literature (1948, 1955, 1962).

Beginning in the late 1970s, formalism was substantially displaced by various approaches (often with political aims or assumptions) that were suspicious of the idea that a literary work could be separated from its origins or uses.^{[citation needed]} The term has often had a pejorative cast and has been used by opponents to indicate either aridity or ideological deviance.^{[citation needed]} Some recent trends in academic literary criticism suggest that formalism may be making a comeback

Schools of Criticism

Schools of Criticism

Suppose we bear that question in mind in surveying the various schools of criticism. There are many, but could perhaps be grouped as:

Traditional

Though perhaps Edwardian in style, this approach — essentially one of trying to broaden understanding and appreciation — is still used in general surveys of English literature. There is usually some information on the writer and his times, and a little illustration, but no close analysis of the individual work or its aims.

New Criticism

The poem (the approach works best for poetry, and especially the lyric) is detached from its biographical or historical context, and analyzed thoroughly: diction, imagery, meanings, particularly complexities of meaning. Some explanation of unfamiliar words and/or uses may be allowed, but the poem is otherwise expected to stand on its own feet, as though it were a contemporary production.

Rhetorical

Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, and the rhetorical approach attempts to understand how the content of the poem, which is more than intellectual meaning, is put across. How arguments are presented, attitudes struck, evidence marshalled, various appeals made to the reader — all are relevant.

Chicago school

The Chicago School of literary criticism was a form of criticism of English literature begun at the University of Chicago in the 1930s, which lasted until the 1950s. It was also called Neo-Aristotelianism, due to its strong emphasis on Aristotle’s concepts of plot, character and genre. It was partly a reaction to New Criticism, a then highly popular form of literary criticism, which the Chicago critics accused of being too subjective and placing too much importance on irony and figurative language. They aimed instead for total objectivity, and a strong classical basis of evidence for criticism. The New Critics regarded the language and poetic diction as most important, but the Chicago School considered such things merely the building material of poetry. Like Aristotle, they valued the structure or form of a literary work as a whole, rather than the complexities of the language. Despite this, the Chicago school is considered by some to be a part of the New Criticism movement.

Archetypal literary criticism

Archetypal literary criticism is a type of critical theory that interprets a text by focusing on recurring myths and archetypes (from the Greek archē, or beginning, and typos, or imprint) in the narrative, symbols, images, and character types in a literary work. As a form of literary criticism, it dates back to 1934 when Maud Bodkin published Archetypal Patterns in Poetry.

Archetypal literary criticism’s origins are rooted in two other academic disciplines, social anthropology and psychoanalysis; each contributed to the literary criticism in separate ways, with the latter being a sub-branch of the critical theory. Archetypal criticism was its most popular in the 1950s and 1960s, largely due to the work of Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye. Though archetypal literary criticism is no longer widely practiced, nor have there been any major developments in the field, it still has a place in the tradition of literary studies. 

Frazer

The anthropological origins of archetypal criticism can pre-date its psychoanalytic origins by over thirty years. The Golden Bough (1890–1915), written by the Scottish anthropologist James G. Frazer was the first influential text dealing with cultural mythologies. Frazer was part of a group of comparative anthropologists working out of Cambridge University who worked extensively on the topic. The Golden Bough was widely accepted as the seminal text on myth that spawned numerous studies on the same subject. Eventually, the momentum of Frazer’s work carried over into literary studies.

In The Golden Bough Frazer identifies shared practices and mythological beliefs between primitive religions and modern religions. Frazer argues that the death-rebirth myth is present in almost all cultural mythologies, and is acted out in terms of growing seasons and vegetation. The myth is symbolized by the death (i.e. final harvest) and rebirth (i.e. spring) of the god of vegetation. As an example, Frazer cites the Greek myth of Persephone, who was taken to the Underworld by Hades. Her mother Demeter, the goddess of the harvest, was so sad that she struck the world with fall and winter. While in the underworld Persephone ate 6 of the 12 pomegranate seeds given to her by Hades. Because of what she ate, she was forced to spend half the year, from then on, in the underworld, representative of autumn and winter, or the death in the death-rebirth myth. The other half of the year Persephone was permitted to be in the mortal realm with Demeter, which represents spring and summer, or the rebirth in the death-rebirth myth.

مکتب رئالیسم و ناتورالیسم

ادبیات :: مکتب های ادبی :: مکتب رئالیسم و ناتورالیسم

نیمه دوم قرن نوزدهم (1900ـ 1850) با چندین جریان هنری منجمله رئالیسم و ناتورالیسم همراه بود که بازتابی از نگرانی های اجتماعی و علمی آن عصر بودند. رئالیسم متشکل از کلمه «ریئل » به معنای «واقعیت» و درمجموع به معنای حقیقت جویی و واقع بینی است. رئالیسم از میل و گرایش هنرمندان (بویژه رمان نویسها و نقاشها) برای نزدیک کردن هنر با واقعیت به وجود آمد. هنرمندان این مکتب عقیده داشتند که مناظر زندگانی باید آیینه وار، بی کم وزیاد و بدون دخل و تصرف نمایانده شوند وحقایق طبیعی ، در صنایع و ادبیات ارائه شود. رئالیسم قبل از سال 1850 به وجود آمد ولی بعداز این تاریخ طرفدارانی پیدا کرد و گسترش یافت. درابتدا منتقدان آثارهنری این کلمه را به کار بردند. بعد به تدریج در واژگان نقد ادبی رایج شد . به عنوان مثال وقتی کوربه روستایی را بدون تلاش برای آراستن و زیباجلوه دادن آن با تمام واقعیتهایش به تصویر می کشید برای نقد کار او از اصطلاح «رئالیسم» استفاده می کردند. ناتورالیسم ، نوعی رئالیسم است که به افراط و اغراق کشیده شده است . البته به طور کلی رئالیسم و ناتورالیسم یک هدف را دنبال می کنند. رئالیسم رسالت تقلید و نمونه برداری از طبیعت وحقایق را بر عهده داشت و با نویسندگانی مانند فلوبر و نقاشانی مانند کوربه مشهور شد. به همین دلیل طبیعت گرایی (ناتورالیسم ) با رهبری زولا درادبیات وکروت ، منه و دوگاس درنقاشی ، برای رئالیسم جانشین مناسبی بود و دراین مکتب برای رسیدن به واقعیات به علم رجوع می شد. زولا، طبیعت گرایی را به عنوان روش علمی جدید و دقیق درادبیات تعریف کرد. بنابراین باید منشأ آن را درتحول علمی قرن جست وجو نمود. دو عنوان «رمان تجربی » و «تاریخ طبیعی و اجتماعی » مشخص کننده موضوعات جریان طبیعت گرایی هستند واین دو موضوع ارتباط تنگاتنگ با حوزه علمی دارند

Literature

People sometimes differentiate between "literature" and some popular forms of written work. The terms "literary fiction" and "literary merit" serve to distinguish between individual works. Critics may exclude works from the classification "literature," for example, on the grounds of bad grammar or syntax, unbelievable or disjointed story, or inconsistent characterization. Sometimes, a work may be excluded based on its prevailing subject or theme: genre fiction such as romances, crime fiction, (mystery), science fiction, horror or fantasy have all been excluded at one time or another from the literary pantheon, and depending on the dominant mode, may or may not come back into vogue.

تعریف نقد

نقد در لغت به معنی « جدا کردن دینار و درهم سره از ناسره و تمیز دادن خوب از بد و بهین چیزی برگزیدن » است.
در اصطلاح ادب، تشخیص محاسن و معایب سخن و نشان دادن بد و خوب اثر ادبی است.

اهمیت و فایده ی نقد ادبی

1 – نقد ادبی امکان درک نکته های بدیع و لطیف آثار را فراهم می کند در نتیجه خواننده می تواند از مطالعه ی آثار ادبی بهره و لذت ببرد.

2 – ارزش واقعی، آثار ادبی را آشکار می کند و مشخص می کند که رعایت چه قواعد و اصولی سبب شده تا اثری مورد قبول واقع شود و یا وجود چه عواملی سبب شده تا اثری مورد بی اعتنایی قرار گیرد.

3– نقد ادبی، مانع از آن می شود که گزافه گویان و مدعیان دروغین بتوانند آثار بی ارزش خود را به جویندگان و طالبان هنر عرضه کنند.

4 – نقد ادبی، وقتی مفید خواهد بود و ارزش و اهمیت دارد که دور از شایبه ی اغراض باشد.
5 – نقد ادبی، گذشته از این که سازنده و دارای اهمیت فراوان است گاهی خود،نوعی آفرینش هنری نیز محسوب می شود.

حدود و امکان نقد ادبی

نقد ادبی، بررسی همه جانبه و کامل یک اثر ادبی است. از این دو اکتفا کردن به شکل ظاهری اثر یعنی توجه به نقد لغوی کافی نیست و منتقد می باید به بحث در باب جوهر و معنی و مضمون یک اثر ادبی نیز بپردازد ( نقد معنی ) و هدف و غرض خاص شاعر یا نویسنده را باز گو کند.

- اغلب مردم، ذوق را ملاک سنجش آثار ادبی دانسته اند و به همین دلیل است که غالباً در میان مردم در تعیین بهترین شاعر یا نویسنده اختلاف هست.
- منتقد باید با دید و وجدان علمی و دور از هر نوع نظر شخص و با میزان های منطقی و علمی به کار نقد و نقادی بپردازد و نقد خود را از هر نوع شایبه ی غرض دور نگه دارد که لازمه ی این کار هم آن است که ابتدا آثاری که در ادبیات جهان در نزد اکثر مردم به عنوان اصلی و خالص و قابل قبول شناخته شده اند چنان که باید معلوم شوند.
- کامل ترین نوع نقد آن است که بر کامل ترین شناخت و جامع ترین دیدها مبتنی باشد.