NB: Many of the notes below refer to Anne Stevens's Literary Theory and Criticism: An Introduction.Most emphasis are mine.

How to use this handout

Anglo-American Formalists

A classic question a New Critic might ask of a literary text would look something like this:

What one, true, unified interpretation best represents the organic unity of this work? In other words, how can I incorporate all the elements of this work so that uncovers a central meaning of this work, a meaning that carries universal significance to humanity?

Practical and New Critics

• US = New Criticism
• UK = Pragmatical Criticism

Many guides to literary theory posit the New Critics as the antithesis to theory, suggesting that close reading is a natural or unsophisticated approach to literature while “theoretical” approaches add something more to close reading. Yet close reading and the practices of Anglo-American formalism were themselves built upon theories of interpretation (the idea that interpretation is not merely subjective but can be objective), authorship (the theory that poets lose their personalities in writing and that critics should pay attention to language over author), and reading (the notion of close reading stresses rereading and attention to the nuances of language). The New Critics privileged certain types of texts and certain types of questions, linguistically complex works of poetry and fiction, mostly by white male authors. (Stevens 145)

Key Concepts of New Criticism (definitions from Stevens 145-146)

• Close Reading: "a method of literary analysis that privileges literary form over questions of history, intention, politics, or psychology. The New Critics paid close attention to literary expression and especially to moments of irony, ambiguity, and paradox in a text. One early New Critical manifesto is Ransom’s “Criticism Inc.” (1937). In it he calls for criticism to be more scientific by focusing on close readings of texts instead of focusing on personal response, history, linguistics, or morality."
• "the heresy of paraphrase": "This phrase, from Brooks’s The Well Wrought Urn (1947), means that literary language can never be simplified into paraphrase and is always richer than any one interpretation. Brooks concentrates on moments of paradox in his close readings of poems, places where texts can’t be simply paraphrased because they contain two contradictory meanings at the same time. For the New Critics, paradox is the essence of good literature."
• "the intentional fallacy": "This phrase, the title of a 1946 essay by W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, refers to the idea that we can never know, and shouldn’t try to determine, what an author intended. All we can go on are the words the author wrote and the effect they have on the reader. They argue that even if you were to ask authors point blank what they meant by a piece of writing, you couldn’t trust their reply. An author’s work should speak for itself. In a larger sense, this downplaying of authorial intention connects to a larger lack of interest in author biography and to Eliot’s notion of depersonalization. A great work of literature, they believe, shouldn’t be a piece of autobiography, but should have larger, impersonal artistic aims."
• "the affective fallacy": "This is another Wimsatt and Beardsley phrase and the title of a 1949 essay cautioning readers not to confuse a text with their emotional response to it. Here they’re arguing against Walter Pater’s impressionistic approach to literary analysis in favor of something much more objective and scientific."

A number of the New Critics were associated with a movement called Southern Agrarianism. Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren were among the “Twelve Southerners” who contributed to a collective volume called I’ll Take My Stand (1930), whose title comes from a line in the Confederate anthem “Dixie.” This manifesto in support of a “Southern way of life” is both anti-industrial and deeply racist. Warren, for example, in an essay called “The Briar Patch,” defends segregation and calls for African Americans to stay in the rural South sharecropping rather than migrating to industrial jobs in the North. He ignores the realities of lynching and racial violence, treating African Americans as inherently inferior to whites. (He later recanted these views.) Within this Southern Agrarian context, the ideas of the New Critics can take on a sinister note. The turn away from formalism in the 1960s toward approaches that deal with race, class, and gender (see Chapter 8) is in part a response to this side of the New Critics. As literary studies has expanded to include more women and people of color (as scholars, students, and writers to be studied), the New Critics’ isolation from context, emphasis on a white male canon, and racist past have become ever more dated." (Stevens 146)

Other New Criticism Keywords

• Timeless, autonomous (self-sufficient) verbal object
• Literary Language
• Organic Unity:  "An idea that can be traced back to Aristotle and that approaches literary texts as though they are complete wholes. No single piece of an organically unified work can be removed without affecting the whole." (Stevens 263) Basically, form creates meaning.
• Ambiguity
• Tension
• the Speaker

New Critical Readings

Wimsatt and Beardsley. "The Intentional Fallacy" Please read this short excerpt of their work

• "A poem does not come into existence by accident" (2).
• "One must ask how a critic expects to get an answer to the question about [authorial] intention" (2).
• "Judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine. One demands that it work" (2).
• "The meaning of a poem may certainly be a personal one . . . But even a short lyric poem is dramatic, the response of a speaker (no matter how abstractly conceived) to a situation (no matter how universalized). We ought to impute the thoughts and attitude of the poem immediately to the dramatic ''speaker,'' and if to the author at all, only by an act of biographical inference" (3).
• "There is a sense in which an author, by revision, may better achieve his original intention, it is only the very abstract, tautological, sense that he intended to write a better work and now has done it.. . . . His former specific intention was not his intention" (3).

• Does authorial intent matter?

  • "The poem is not the critic's own and not the author's (it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it. The poem belongs to the public. It is embodied in language, the peculiar possession of the public, and it is about the human being, an object of public knowledge. What is said about the poem is subject to the same scrutiny as any statement in linguistics or the general science of psychology or morals" (3).
  • Wimsatt and Beardsley refer to the use of authorial intent as a form of interpretative argument as "the intentional fallacy"(4).

Other Keywords

• Alusiveness
• Objectivity
• Intentionalism

Connected Literary Works:

• Eliot "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
• Keats "Ode on a Grecian Urn"
  Donne "The Canonization"
• McKay. "On Broadway"; Some Sonnets: "America," "If We Must Die"
• Hughes. "The Negro Speaks of Rivers", "Note On Commercial Theatre" (images of the accompanying music and some background)

Brooks. "The Heresy of Paraphrase" Please read this short excerpt

Central question: How do we determine the "meaning" of a poem?

• On the poems chosen for his book, ''The Well-Wrought Urn'': "The 'content; of the poems is various, and if we attend to find one ''quality'' of content which is shared by all poems--a "poetic" subject matter or diction or imagery--we shall find that we have merely confused the issues. For what is it to be poetic?" (193).
• Not a Structuralist: "But though it is in terms of structure that we must describe poetry, the term 'structure' is certainly not altogether satisfactory as a term. . . . . The structure meant is certainly not "form" in the conventional sense in which we think of form as a kind of envelope which contains' the 'content'" (194).
  • "The structure meant is a structure of meanings, evaluation, and interpretations, and the principle of unity which informs it seems to be one of the balancing and harmonizing connotations, attitudes, and meanings. ...The unity is not a unity of the sort to be achieved by the reduction and simplification appropriate to an algebraic formula. It is a positive unity, not a negative; it represents, not a residue but an achieved harmony" (195).
• The problem of paraphrase: "To repeat, most of our difficulties in criticism are rooted in the heresy of paraphrase. If we allow ourselves to be misled by it, we distort the relation of the poem to its 'truth,' we raise the problem of belief in a vicious and crippling form, we split the poem between its 'form' and its 'content' --we bring the statement to be conveyed into an unreal competition with science or philosophy or theology" (201).
• On unity: "In the unified poem, the poet has 'come to terms' with his experience. The poem does not merely eventuate in a logical conclusion. The conclusion of the poem is the working out of the various tensions--set up by whatever means--by propositions, metaphors, symbols. The unity is achieved by a dramatic process, not a logical; it represents an equilibrium of forces, not formula. It is 'proved' as a dramatic conclusion is proved: by its ability to resolve the conflicts which have been accepted as the ''données'' of the drama" (207).

Brooks. "The Formalist Critics" (Optional)It can be read here

Central question: What is literary criticism?

Neo-Aristotelian Terms

The neo-Aristotelians wanted to reconcile differences among critical schools and castigate the New Critics for being too single-minded in their creation of heresies and fallacies. In an influential collection of essays, Crane accuses the
New Critics of not paying enough attention to the generic context of a work (whether an author is writing in a didactic or satirical mode appropriate to a particular genre, for example). Instead of paying attention to the particular genres of individual poems, he says, the New Critics “read all poems as if their authors had constructed them on identical principles.”¹ The Chicago critics brought an interest in genre and classification (Aristotle’s specialties) back into
literary studies. (Stevens 147)

• rhetoric: "The study of language as a means of persuasion." (Stevens 265)
• implied author: "Wayne Booth’s term for the version of the author’s self that stands behind a work of literature. Although readers can never access the 'true' self behind a piece of writing, they can discern the presence of an implied author or 'second self' as distinct from the characters and narrator the author creates." (Stevens 261)
• unreliable narrator: "Wayne Booth’s term for a narrator whose facts or values are at odds with the implied author's" (Stevens 266). This term is frequently used when the narrator's interpretation of characters and events are undermined by other aspects of the text.
   

Eliot Links

• My Eliot YouTube Playlist of commentary and related works.
• Elliot. "Talent and Tradition" (I only assigned Part I of this argument. If you want to read more, see this link)
• Eliot's Wasteland
• Elliot. Wasteland (hypertext)
  • Recording of Eliot reading Wasteland (YouTube)
  • Audio for Wasteland (LibriVox)
  • Images of Pound's editing suggestions for the Wasteland. British Library.
  • Ford, Mark. "Ezra Pound and the drafts of The Waste Land" British Library Website. 13 December 2016
  • Podcast: "The Wasteland and Modernity" In Our Time. BBC 4 (26 February 2009)
• Another poem by Eliot: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
  • Audio for Prufrock (LibriVox)
  • Recording of Eliot reading Prufrock (YouTube)
  • Kipling's "The Love-song of Har-Dyal" and Background Notes (Influenced Prufrock)
• General Eliot Things:
  • "T.S. Eliot and Antisemitism"
  • Recent Release of his love letters to Emily Hale
    • Morning Edition. "T.S. Eliot's Love Letters Unsealed" NPR. (4 January 2020) [includes transcript]
    • Parker. "The Secret Cruelty of T.S. Eliot" The Atlantic (6 April 2020)
    • Scripps College. "From the Archives: The Love Song of T.S. Eliot and Emily Hale" (14 February 2018) - in which my undergraduate college is slightly bitter that her letters went to Princeton
      • Their follow-up blurb (3 January 2020)
    • Martin. "The End of the Thousand-Letter Affair." Los Angeles Times (5 March 1989) - because it wasn't as if this was a secret, just no one could read the actual letters until 2020.