by Michelle Mclean

Created on: March 08, 2009

New Criticism seeks to analyze a text using only the actual literature. While this criticism is no longer technically practiced as a separate criticism, its concepts have become integrated into other criticisms, so it is still valuable to know and understand the elements of this literary criticism. In fact, whenever a reader analyzes the irony, ambiguity, symbolism, and even metaphors in a text, they are using the principles of New Criticism.

New Criticism focuses only on the text of literature, without considering any other forces at work on the particular piece, such as the author's background or when or where the piece was written. New Criticism also does not take into account the author's intention behind the piece. As a writer, I can tell you that what I write and what I intended to write are not always one and the same. Similarly, how a reader responds to a piece is not always the reaction the writer intends for the reader. Because of this, New Critics view a literary work as "a timeless, autonomous (self-sufficient) verbal object. Readers and reading may change, but the literary text stays the same" (Tyson 137).

In New Criticism, the quality of a piece is judged by its "organic quality," or the way in which all the parts of the piece come together to create the finished product. The "criteria of literary value" with which New Critics examine a text consists of complexity, (found in the text's use of "paradox, irony, ambiguity, and tension") and order, the way in which these literary devices combine and contribute to the theme of the work. The theme, "what the text does with its topic," is "an interpretation of human experience," and can be found by analyzing the above listed devices (141).

Anyone who has taken any kind of literature class will recognize terms such as irony, paradox, metaphor, simile, symbolism, and others like these. These are the tools that a New Critic uses to analyze a text, to find its theme and meaning. This criticism probably works best with short texts and poems. While it can, and is, certainly used to analyze longer texts, shorter pieces can be easily dissected, and the pieces carefully combed through to find the meaning in each line or phrase. This criticism may no longer be commonly used as a separate analyzing tool, but it unquestionably has not disappeared. Its concepts and practices are alive and working and are very valuable instruments in examining literature works.

Source Cited: Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide. Routledge: New York, NY, 2006.

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