New Criticism

In his second edition textbook, How to Interpret literature, Robert D. Parker makes the point that the respect of those who are professionals in any field of the humanities lacks the reputation of the sciences. To some extent, this has to do with the theoretical grounding in each discipline. If one studies biology, physics, or chemistry, one receives a title as a biologist, a physicist, or a chemist. In contrast, no such titles exist for one studying English or Philosophy. This implies that an expert on literary criticism is academically known as an English teacher as opposed to literary criticism being respected as a profession of its own, where critics are known as critics instead of being known by some broader term or field. If we were to apply the same token to the sciences, a professional in biology would be called a Scientist rather than a biologist (13 - 14).

Furthermore, Parker also describes how the ‘new critics’ view literature. When discussing the changes that literary critics have suffered, Parker defines the new critics as “criticism that is not about vague interpretations or feelings” (14). Instead, new critics “[see] literary writing as primarily about literary art and only secondarily about ideas and beliefs” (Parker 16). In that sense, for the new critics, literary critics must have a strict and clear method and the study of literature must focus on the text itself. Using philosophy, personal opinions, or feelings as the primary source of one’s literary analysis blurs the literary method, and in turn, is the cause of the lack of respect for literary criticism as a profession. As a writer and a student of literature, I have some reservations in regard to this view.

In the early stages of my studies, I was taught to embrace a sort of extreme new criticism for reading literature. My main focus was the text. Finding ideas, repetitions and patterns was my main task. I took new criticism so seriously that I ended up arguing about the symbolism of dead bodies in Beowulf and the importance of intentional murdering and how light and darkness, illustrated by day and night, ‘symbolized’ intentionality. But if I am honest with myself; that is to say, if I am serious about how day and light have little to do with murder. I have to conclude that unless one takes ‘new criticism as a literary word game, there is no concrete way in which new critics can say anything about the real world. Anything can be a symbol of anything. Heroes can be murderers if we can find a symbol that shows that day and night have some property in common and that the hero murders in the daylight to save lives, who can then sleep peacefully at night. These are not the kinds of connections or correlations that other disciplines like science are concerned with. Not all literary patterns should be taken seriously. Many of these patterns only have a place in the subjective imagination, but this is not a subject of rigorous study.

Still, in some very deep place of my heart, I sympathize with the new critics. I understand how it feels to come up with “unity” (Parker 17) when writing a literary analysis. It’s that moment when one finds out that the contradictions of the text can be unified to write down complex ideas and essentially say every time that we write that life is dense and complex.