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أكـاديـمـي ذهـبـي
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رد: l|][Ξ¯▪ Last Year 1st Semester ▪¯Ξ][|
Synopsis of New Critical thought
Although the New Critics are often thought of as a school, it is important to note that, due to key ideological differences among some of its most prominent members, New Criticism never coalesced into a unified "science of literature." The major critics who are often grouped together as being the seminal figures of New Criticism are: T.S. Eliot, F.R. Leavis, William Empson, Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, and Cleanth Brooks. It is worthwhile to note that the New Criticism was rather unique because a sizable number of practicing New Critics were also active as poets, novelists, and short-story writers, while almost all literary critics today are exclusively scholars and academics.
Although difficult to summarize, it is sufficient to say that New Criticism resembled the Formalism of I.A. Richards, in that it focused on a meticulous analysis of the literary text to the exclusion of outside details. In particular, the notion of the ambiguity of literary language is an important concept within New Criticism; several prominent New Critics have been particularly fascinated with the way that a text can display multiple simultaneous meanings. In the 1930s, I.A. Richards borrowed Sigmund Freud's term "overdetermination" 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" was an act of superstition (The Philosophy of Rhetoric, 39).
In 1954, William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley published an essay entitled "The Intentional Fallacy" that would become a watershed text in the development of New Criticism. The essay 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; the reader has no privileged access into the author's mind to determine what the author "intended" to say. The importation of meanings from outside the text was quite irrelevant, and potentially distracting. This became a central tenet of New Criticism.
Because New Critics admit no information other than that contained in the text, no proper New Critical investigation should include biographical information on the author. Furthermore, studying a passage of prose or poetry in New Critical style requires careful, exacting scrutiny of the passage itself—a rigid attitude for which the New Critics have often been reproached in later times. Nevertheless, close reading is now a fundamental tool of literary criticism. Such a reading places great emphasis on the particular over the general, paying close attention to individual words, syntax, even punctuation, and the order in which sentences and images unfold as they are read. In later times, the excruciatingly exact style of reading advocated by New Criticism has been jokingly referred to as "analyzing the daylights out of a poem before thirty stupified undergraduates."
Nevertheless, despite the numerous flaws of an exclusively New Critical approach, the New Critics were one of the most successful schools of literary theory in the admittedly brief history of literary studies. In the hundred or so years that literature has been taken seriously as an academic discipline within the university system, the New Critics are undoubtedly the most influential, and longest-lasting, of all critical schools. It was not until the politically and ideologically turbulent decades of the 1960s and 70s that the methods of the New Critics were questioned, and in the wake of their downfall, literary theory has never had as unified a system of literary analysis as it had during the time of New Criticism. Current scholars are beginning to reevaluate the methods of the New Critics in order to apply them to the broader fields of culturally and politically relevant criticism that have emerged, and it is clear that many of the ideas of the New Critics—and those of Formalists at large—are far from obsolete.
I.A. Richards
Ivor Armstrong Richards (February 26, 1893-1979) was an influential literary critic and rhetorician who is often cited as the founder of an Anglophone school of Formalist criticism that would eventually become known as the New Criticism. Richards' books, especially The Meaning of Meaning, Principles of Literary Criticism, Practical Criticism, and The Philosophy of Rhetoric, were seminal documents not only for the development of New Criticism, but also for the fields of semiotics, the philosophy of language, and linguistics. Moreover, Richards was an accomplished teacher, and most of the eminent New Critics were Richards' students at one time or another. Since the New Criticism, at least in English-speaking countries, is often thought of as the beginning of modern literary criticism, Richards is one of the founders of the contemporary study of literature in English.
Although Richards is often labeled as the father of the New Criticism, he would likely dispute the connection, as the New Criticism was largely the product of his students, who extended, re-interpreted, and in some cases misinterpreted, Richards' more general theories of language. Although Richards was a literary critic, he was trained as a philosopher, and it is important to note that his own theories of literature were primarily carried out to further a philosophical theory of language, rather than as a critical theory of literature. Richards is perhaps most famous for an anecdote he reproduced in Practical Criticism, illustrating his style of critical reading. As a classroom assignment, Richards would give undergraduates short poems, stories, or passages from longer works without indicating who the authors were. He discovered that virtually all of his students—even the most exceptional ones—were utterly at a loss to interpret, say, a sonnet of Shakespeare's, without relying on the clichés drawn from Shakespeare's biography and style. In attempting to ascertain why his students had such difficulty interpreting literary texts without the aid of biographical and historical commonplaces, Richards hit upon his method of extremely close-reading, forcing his students to pay an almost captious degree of attention to the precise wording of a text.
In addition to developing the method of close reading that would become the foundation of Formalist criticism, Richards was also deeply invested in understanding literary interpretation from the perspective of psychology and psychoanalysis. He was well-read in the psychological theory of his day, helping to further the development of psychoanalytic criticism that would ultimately surpass the New Criticism embraced by most of his students. While Richards' theories of poetic interpretation and poetic language have been surpassed, his initial impulse to ground a theory of interpretation in psychology and textual analysis has become the paradigm for the development of the curriculum of literary studies.
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