Unit+5-+New+Criticism


 * === There were many literary schools of criticism which flourished before the emergence of New Criticism in the 1920s. Discuss the main principles of those schools. ===

==== The last decades of the 19th C. and early years of the 20th C. witnessed the emergence of many schools of literary criticism which collectively believed that the function of criticism should be the discovery of how history, the personal lives of the authors, and the readers' perspective influenced the literature of the period. Among the schools that practiced criticism during that era was the school of Expressive Theory—the Romantic Critics—who believed that the artist's feelings and emotions are what really matter for the creation of a literary text. Therefore, any critical reading should highlight those feelings and emotions. Another school was that of Extrinsic Analysis. The critics in this school examined the elements outside the text to uncover the meaning of the text. They emphasized the importance of history and biography in understanding the text's message or theme. The Impressionistic Critics, however, focused on the readers. They believed that what we feel and what we personally see in a work of art are what really matters. The Naturalistic Critics—influenced by Naturalism-- were more philosophical. They believed that man is nothing more than an animal and that his life on this planet is predetermined by fate and instincts. The New Humanists—recalling Plato— valued the moral qualities of art and insisted that the analysis of literary texts should uncover this aspect. The New Critics rejected this romantic view of life and art. All those schools did not come up with a systematic approach to the reading of a literary text. It was left to the American New Critics, who were influenced by the Russian Formalists, to develop such a systematic approach. ====

** What are the main concepts which New Criticism advocated? **

The New Critics insisted that a poem (or any literary work) is like any artistic object. Therefore, to evaluate it, the critic has to pay attention only to its elements and ignore everything that is outside it. History, the life of the author or his emotions and feelings should not be the main focus of the critical reading. Like the Russian Formalists, the New Critics believed in "the text and text alone" approach to literary texts.