2. Formalist Approaches
Broadly: concerned exclusively with the text in
isolation from the world, author, or reader
Specifically:
Russian Formalism focused on literariness of
texts, defamiliarization, material & device,
story & plot, narrative voice
New Criticism focused on the text as an
object that can be analyzed independent of
author, world, or reader
3. New Criticism: The Quest for “Text-centricity”
• formalist school from 1920 – 1960
• methodology applied to yield single, correct “hidden
meaning” of literary texts
• “close readings” focused on literary devices
• looked at language-denotation, connotation, form, figures,
import, structure.
• valued complexity, oppositions, irony, paradox
• emphasized objectivity in literary criticism
• looks to language denotation, connotation, form, figures, structure
• asks for educated audience/“willing students”
4. Precursors
• Aristotle focused on elements w/ which a work is
composed.
• Romantics stressed organic unity from imagination’s
“esemplastic” power.
• Poe extolled the “singleness of effect” in poetry &
fiction.
• James made the same case for fiction as “organic
form.”
6. Practitioners of New Criticism
British:
I. A. Richards,William Empson,
F.R. Leavis
American:
W.K. Wimsatt, Allen Tate, Robert
Penn Warren, Richard Blackmur,
Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe
Ransom
7. Origins in early 1900s
“honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is
directed not upon the poet but upon the
poetry” (Eliot, Selected Essays 17).
Strove for scientific objectivity but of a special
nature because words enable multiple
perspectives.
8. Major Texts of New Criticism
I.A. Richards The Principles of Literary Criticism,
Practical Criticism (1920s)
The Fugitives & Southern Agrarians formed
John Crowe Ransom’s The New Criticism (1941):
poems as a concrete entity like any other art object
Cleanth Brooks’ The Well Wrought Urn (1947):
9. Central Argument
The poem is the raison d’etre.
• to place poet or culture above the literary
expression is to move away from essential unity of
poem.
• employing biography, history or affect is an
inherently vague and unreliable basis for analysis.
• objective analysis is far more inclusive and
forgiving methodology.
10. “The Heresy of Paraphrase”
Cleanth Brooks, 1947
• from The Well Wrought Urn--treatment of ten
poems spanning historical /canonical record
from Shakespeare to Yeats.
• employs “close-reading” techniques to see
“what the masterpieces had in common”
(1354)
• Poems chosen for Brooks
• added metaphysical (Donne) and modern
(Yeats)
11. William K. Wimsatt, Jr.
(1907-75)
•
•
•
•
Born-Washington, D.C.
Georgetown, Ph.D. Yale
Taught @ Yale-1939
Known for works on
Samuel Johnson
• Literary Criticism:
• The Verbal Icon
• w/Cleanth Brooks
•
•
The Intentional Fallacy
The Affective Fallacy
Monroe C. Beardsley
(1915-85)
•
•
•
•
•
•
Born-Connecticut
Ph.D. Yale, briefly in
Philosophy dept.
Mt. Holyoke, 1944
Taught literary criticism
Swarthmore and Temple
Aesthetics and
Philosophy
Joint w/ Wimsatt
•
•
The Intentional Fallacy
The Affective Fallacy
12. What is “Paraphrase”?
The attempt to evaluate a poem by presenting a
proposition about the poem’s meaning apart
from its form; i.e. giving a “prose-sense” to the
poem.
13. Central Argument
• Structure : whole is greater than sum of parts
• Rational meaning and Emotive meaning
• Import
• Suggestion
• Reduction of “meaning”
• lowest common denominator
14. Problems inherent…
• “all such formulations lead away from the center of
the poem—not toward it…”
• Paraphrase strips poem of poetic power
• “form and content, or content and medium, are
inseparable.”(1357)
• Longinus—remark on Euripides (154)
*
16. The Intentional Fallacy
• Published 1946
• Objective literary criticism defended
• Criticism hampered by use of biography or
“genealogy” to evaluate the effectiveness of
poetry
• Intentionalists tend to move away from the
poem
17. What is the Intentional Fallacy?
• A confusion between the poem and its origins
(genealogy-Genetic Fallacy)
• Starts with the “causes” and ends in “biography and
relativism” (1388)
• Intention: “design or plan in author's mind” (1375)
• “Intention” not stable standard of literary criticism:
• unavailable
• undesirable
18. Unavailable Intention
• Work is “detached from the author at birth” (1376)
• Echoes Jean-Paul Sartre
• Unduly extends the author’s creative freedom.
• Completed work belongs to the public and to their
interpretations and evaluations
• Child/Parent Analogy
*
19. Undesirable Intention
• Work measured against something “outside
of the author” (1381)
• “author psychology” (1381).
• Attractive from an historical or biographical
perspective
• W & B warn against confusing “personal and
poetic studies”
• “Critical inquiries are not settled by
consulting the oracle”(1387)
• Settling a bet: Eliot
• Criticism must depend on recognition of
difference
• Internal vs. external sources of evidence of
meaning
20. Internal vs. External Evidence
• Internal evidence of meaning discovered
through “the semantics and syntax of a
poem, through grammars, dictionaries, and
all the literature which is the source of
dictionaries, [and] in general through all that
makes a language and culture” (1381)
• External evidence of meaning consists of
“revelations about how or why the poet
wrote the poem” (1381)
• One moves toward poem, one moves away
21. Essence of Objective Critical
Literary Analysis
Successful works contain all necessary and
relevant information to find meaning
• Example: Derek Walcott's “Ruins of a Great
House”
22. “The Affective Fallacy”
• Published in 1949
• Companion article to “The Intentional Fallacy”
• Recount history and results of psychological, emotiondriven conception of literary analysis
• Focus on role and function of critic
• Critic is teacher or explicator of meaning
• Arnoldian “personal fallacy”
23. What is the Affective Fallacy?
Confusing the POEM with its RESULTS
i.e. what a poem is with what a poem does
But what does that mean?
How does that represent a fallacy?
*
24. Affective Critics:
Shifting the Focus
• Critics engaged in Affective Theory will
• use emotional response as evaluative
standard
• subjugate poem to subjective emotional
response,
• Critic/reader the actual object of cognitive
focus.
• differentiate cognitive effects and emotive
affects
• In accounting for affect, reader must reengage text
• E.g. Donne’s “The Canonization”
25. Summary
The poem is the raison d’etre.
• To place poet or culture above literary
expression is to move away from essential
unity of poem.
• Employing biography, history or affect is an
inherently vague and unreliable basis for
analysis.
• Objective analysis is far more inclusive and
forgiving methodology.
Editor's Notes
“I’m full of troubles, there’s room for no more.”
Re-arranging makes apparent that composition (form), not sense, is the arbiter of greatness in that form carries the sense; they are indivisible
-the attribution of poetic merit based upon origins: intentional fallacy
the attribution of poetic merit based upon response: affective fallacy
To employ an analogy, look at the parent/child relationship. In consulting the parent for information about what they intended for the child to do or be, or in inquiring about the circumstances surrounding its conception and development, the critic/reader is no longer attempting to “know” the child, but is attempting to know “about” the child. The critic is engaging in a psychological deconstruction of the parent’s background, in order to “explain” the child, when the child, fully grown, if properly empowered and informed can speak quite adequately for itself.
The unavailability lies in the inability of the critic to make any reasoned assertions about the relative internal elements and integral “success” of the poem based on such knowledge.
The undesirability of intentionalism is its vague and unstable nature-W and B consider the possibility of a combination, but mainly in the use of biographical information to provide lexical understandings the author assumed, and the “dramatic character of his utterance.” (1381) However, they give strenuous objection to biography the extends beyond the “linguistic fact” of the poem.
For the greatest part of literature, the author is truly not alive and able to illuminate meaning, however, even if the author were available, such insight would not be a stable standard upon which to base literary criticism. In addition, the critic so employed ceases talking about the poem, and begins talking about the author, making him/her the focus rather than the text. This is fine, but it is NOT literary criticism and shouldn’t be confused with such.
Wimsatt and Beardsley use the example of TS Eliot. The “uncertainty of exegesis” which arises by attempting to have the author speak to his “intention.” Only, in looking back on the work, he is already far distanced from the original creative expression. The work has taken on a life of its own-the author can’t help but look back on it through somewhat different eyes-critically or affectionately, rather than creatively.
It means to attempt to erect a standard for literary analysis and criticism based upon the emotive response of the reader.
It is a fallacy for two reasons:
It is wholly subjective and untranslatable, and therefore unreliable, leading one to rely on the “sincerity of the critic” rather than the integrity of the poetic structure.
It, like the paraphrastic heresy is self-negating. (we’ll come back to that idea in a moment)
When the affective critic is hardest pressed to account for the causes of heightened emotional response to poetry, he will necessarily re-engage the text. This is what I mean by self-negating—the more specific the critic is in accounting for the emotive response, the closer the critic comes to rational explication of form, content and meaning.
