2. Agenda
• Lecture: Text-Oriented Approaches: Formalism/New
Criticism Discussion: Formalism/New Criticism
• Group Activity: Participation 10 points
• “My Papa’s Waltz” and “My Papa’s Waltz: A New Critical
Approach.
• Identify and discuss qualities of New Criticism as it is
applied in this essay. Provide specific examples from the
essay, the poem, or the definition/description of New
Criticism.
3. Group Discussion: New
Criticism and Formalism
• What made New
Criticism
new? What is the
critical focus of New
Criticism? Of
Formalism?
4. Text-OrientedApproaches: Formalism/
New Criticism
• The school of New Criticism was made up of
an early 20th-century (predominantly
American) critics who were focused on form
(literary structures), especially in poetry.
These new critics (predominantly men)
determined that the best way to analyze
literature is to imagine that it exists in a
vacuum.
5. • Neither the reader's response or the author's
intentions matter to the new critic. Add to that a
purposeful disregard of the text's historical time
period and political context. For New Criticism, a
literary work is a timeless, self-sufficient verbal
object. Readers and readings may change, but
the literary text stays the same. The text is a self-
referential object that exists in its own sanitized
environment, waiting for us to analyze without
any of our own experiences, views, or prejudices
complicating the single best interpretation of a
piece.
6. Why Study New Criticism?
• While their view of literature
might have been a bit
limited, the New Critics
developed close reading, a
style of analysis that focuses
close attention to the form
and structure of texts. This
skill of close reading is
fundamental to every other
kind of theory.
T.S. Eliot
essayist, publisher,
playwright, literary and
social critic.
7. • For New Criticism, the complexity of a
text is created by the multiple and often
conflicting meanings woven through it.
And these meanings are a product
primarily of four kinds of linguistic
devices: paradox, irony, ambiguity, and
tension.
I. A. Richards
New Critic
8. Paradox
1. a situation or statement which seems impossible or is
difficult to understand because it contains two opposite
facts or characteristics;
2. a statement or idea that contradicts itself;
3. a person who has qualities that are contradictory;
4. something that conflicts with common opinion or belief
9. “Allanimalsareequal,butsomearemoreequalthanothers.”
• In George Orwell’s Animal Farm, one part of the
cardinal rule is the statement above. This
statement seems to not make any sense.
However, on closer examination, it gets clear that
Orwell points out a political truth. The
government in the novel claims that everyone is
equal but it has never treated everyone equally. It
is the concept of equality stated in this paradox
that is opposite to the common belief of equality.
10. “I must be cruel to be kind.”
• This statement by Hamlet seems contradictory at
first. How can an individual treat others kindly
even when he is cruel? However, Hamlet is
referring to his mother and his intention to kill
Claudius (his father’s brother *and murderer+
and his mother’s husband) to avenge his father’s
death. This act will be a tragedy for his mother,
but Hamlet does not want her to be with his
father’s murderer any longer; he believes that
the murder will be good for his mother.
12. Therearethreecommontypesofironyinliterature:
1. Verbal irony occurs when people say the opposite of what they mean.
This is perhaps the most common type of irony. The reader knows that a
statement is ironic because of familiarity with the situation or a
description of voice, facial, or bodily expressions which show the
discrepancy.
• There are two kinds of verbal irony :
• Understatement occurs when one minimizes the nature of something.
• Overstatement occurs when one exaggerates the nature of something.
• Verbal irony in its most bitter and destructive form becomes sarcasm .
• Someone is condemned by a speaker pretending to praise him or her.
2. In situational irony , the situation is different from what common sense
indicates it is, will be, or ought to be. Situational irony is often used to
expose hypocrisy and injustice. (The pickpocket being pickpocketed).
3. Dramatic irony occurs when a character states something that they
believe to be true but that the reader knows is not true. The key to
dramatic irony is the reader's foreknowledge of coming events.
• Second readings of stories often increases dramatic irony because of
knowledge that was not present in the first reading.
13. Thefollowingdescriptionofawealthyhusband’s
senseofmoralrectitude,fromEdithWharton’s
HouseofMirth(1905), isanexampleofanironic
statement.
Once in the winter the rector would come to dine, and her
husband would beg her to go over the list and see that no
divorcées were included, except those who had showed signs of
penitence by being remarried to the very wealthy (57).
Part of the ironic implication of this passage is that the husband
is a hypocrite: he condemns divorce only if it is not followed by
the acquisition of equal or greater wealth, so what he really
condemns, under the guise of moral principles, is financial
decline (Tyson)
14. New Criticism, however, primarily valued irony in a broader
sense of the term, to indicate a text’s inclusion of varying
perspectives on the same characters or events (Tyson)
Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811) offers us
perspectives from which we may utterly condemn
Willoughby for his treachery to Maryanne; forgive him
because his behavior resulted from a combination of love,
financial desperation, and a weakness of character which he
himself laments; sympathize with him for the severity of the
punishment his behavior has brought upon him; and see the
ways in which Maryanne’s willful foolishness contributed to
her own heartbreak.
Such a variety of possible viewpoints is considered a form of
irony because the credibility of each viewpoint undermines to
some extent the credibility of the others. The result is a
complexity of meaning that mirrors the complexity of human
experience and increases the text’s believability
16. Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987)
• For example, in Toni 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 hardships 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 leaves in the fall and are “reborn” every
spring, Sethe is offered, at the novel’s close, the chance
to make a new life).
• In scientific or everyday language, ambiguity is usually
considered a flaw because it’s equated with a lack of
clarity and precision. In literary language, however,
ambiguity is considered a source of richness, depth, and
complexity that adds to the text’s value.
17. Tension
• Finally, the complexity of a literary text is created by its
tension, which, broadly defined, means the linking
together of opposites. In its simplest form, tension is
created by the integration of the abstract and the
concrete, of general ideas embodied in specific images.
18. Tension in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman
For example, 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. Similarly, the concrete image of Linda Loman singing Willy
to sleep embodies the general idea of the devoted wife, the
caretaker, the nurturer. Such concrete universals—or images and
fictional characters that are meaningful on both the concrete
level, where their meaning is literal and specific, and on the
symbolic level, where they have universal significance—are
considered a form of tension because they hold together the
opposing realms of physical reality and symbolic reality in a
way characteristic of literary language. In other words, the
Loman home and the character of Linda Loman represent both
themselves and something larger than themselves.
19. Tension is also created by the dynamic interplay among the
text’s opposing tendencies, that is, among its paradoxes,
ironies, and ambiguities (Tyson).
For example, we might say that the action of Death of a
Salesman is structured by the tension between reality and
illusion: between the harsh reality of Willy Loman’s life and
the self-delusion into which he keeps trying to escape.
Ideally, the text’s opposing tendencies are held in
equilibrium by working together to make a stable and
coherent meaning. For example, the tension between
harsh reality and self-delusion in Death of a Salesman is
held in equilibrium by the following meaning: so great is
Willy’s desire to succeed as a salesman and a father that
his only defense against the common man’s inevitable
failures in a dog-eat-dog world is self-delusion, but that
self-delusion only increases his failure. Thus, the play
shows us how harsh reality and self-delusion feed off each
other until the only escape is death.
20. Figurative language is language that has more than, or other
than, a strictly literal meaning.
• Because of New Criticism’s belief that the literary text
can be understood primarily by understanding its form
(which is why you’ll sometimes hear it referred to as a
type of formalism), a clear understanding of the
definitions of specific formal elements is important. In
addition to the formal elements discussed above—the
linguistic devices of paradox, irony, ambiguity, and
tension— we should also take a moment to briefly define
a few of the most frequently used kinds of figurative
language: images, symbols, metaphors, and similes.
21. images, symbols,
metaphors, and similes
• An image consists of a word or words that refer to an object
perceived by the senses or to sense perceptions themselves:
colors, shapes, lighting, sounds, tastes, smells, textures,
temperatures, and so on. Clouds can suggest both weather and a
depressed mood.
• A symbol is an image that has both literal and figurative
meaning, a concrete universal, such as the swamp in Ernest
Hemingway’s “Big, Two-Hearted River.” The swamp is a literal
swamp, but it also “stands for,” or “figures,” something else: the
emotional problems of the protagonist.
• A metaphor is a comparison of two dissimilar objects in which
the properties of one are ascribed to the other. For example, the
phrase “my brother is a gem” is a metaphor. Obviously, it has no
literal meaning.
• To get from metaphor to simile requires one small step: add like
or as: “my brother is like a gem.”
22. Group Activity: Participation 10 points
• Discuss the poem, “My Papa’s Waltz” and the essay, “My
Papa’s Waltz: A New Critical Approach.”
• Identify and discuss qualities of New Criticism as it is
applied in this essay. Provide specific examples from the
essay, the poem, or the definition/description of New
Criticism.
