EWRT 1CClass 2

AGENDA Teams Review New Criticism The Formal Elements of New

CriticismParadox IronyTensionAmbiguity

QHQs The Online Hour

2. The teams will change on or near essay due dates.

3. You must change at least 50% of your team after each project is completed.

4. You may never be on a team with the same person more than twice.

5. You may never have a new team composed of more than 50% of any prior team.

1. We will often use teams to earn participation points. Your teams can be made up of 4 or 5 people.

Points will be earned for correct answers to questions, meaningful contributions to the discussion, and the willingness to share your work. Each team will track their own points, but cheating leads to death (or loss of 25 participation points).

Answers, comments, and questions must be posed in a manner that promotes learning. Those who speak out of turn or with maliciousness will not receive points for their teams.

At the end of each class, you will turn in a point sheet with the names of everyone in your group (first name, last initial) and your accumulated points for the day. It is your responsibility to make the sheet, track the points, and turn it in.

Sit near your team members in class to facilitate ease of group discussions

Your First Group!

Get into groups of three or four. (1-2 minutes)

If you can’t find a group, please raise your hand.

Introduce yourselves, and write your names down on a sheet of paper. This will be your point sheet.

The ReviewAnd a little something new!

T.S. Eliot

Review of Literary Theory Literary theory is a tool box of strategies to help us read,

interpret, and understand the many facets of a literary work. The ideas used in theory act as different lenses we can use to view and talk about art, literature, and even culture. These diverse lenses give us new ways to consider works of art based on certain hypotheses and conventions within that school of theory. They also allow us to focus on particular aspects of a work we consider important.

Can you name some literary theories?

Which will we focus on?

Some Theoretical Approaches Formalism and New Criticism Marxism and Critical Theory Structuralism and Poststructuralism

(Deconstruction) New Historicism and Cultural Materialism Ethnic Studies and Postcolonial Criticism Gender Studies and Queer Theory Cultural Studies Psychoanalytical Criticism

Trauma Theory Feminist Criticism

Text-Oriented (Intrinsic approaches)Approaches: Formalism/ New Criticism

The school of New Criticism was made up of an early 20th-century (predominantly American) critics who were focused on form (literary structures), especially in poetry. These new critics (predominantly men) determined that the best way to analyze literature is to imagine that it exists in a vacuum.

Neither the reader's response or the author's intentions matter to the new critic. Add to that a purposeful disregard of the text's historical time period and political context. For New Criticism, a literary work is a timeless, self-sufficient verbal object. Readers and readings may change, but the literary text stays the same. The text is a self-referential object that exists in its own sanitized environment, waiting for us to analyze without any of our own experiences, views, or prejudices complicating the single best interpretation of a piece.

Why Study New Criticism?While their view of

literature might have been a bit limited, the New Critics developed close reading, a style of analysis that focuses close attention to the form and structure of texts. This skill of close reading is fundamental to every other kind of theory.

T.S. Eliotessayist, publisher, playwright, literary and social critic.

The Formal Elements of New Criticism

ParadoxIronyTensionAmbiguity

For New Criticism, the complexity of a text is created by the multiple and often conflicting meanings woven through it. And these meanings are a product primarily of four kinds of linguistic devices: paradox, irony, ambiguity, and tension.

I. A. RichardsNew Critic

Paradox1. a situation or statement which seems impossible or is

difficult to understand because it contains two opposite facts or characteristics;

2. a statement or idea that contradicts itself; 3. a person who has qualities that are contradictory;4. something that conflicts with common opinion or belief

“All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.”

In George Orwell’s Animal Farm, one part of the cardinal rule is the statement above. This statement seems to not make any sense. However, on closer examination, it gets clear that Orwell points out a political truth. The government in the novel claims that everyone is equal but it has never treated everyone equally. It is the concept of equality stated in this paradox that is opposite to the common belief of equality.

“I must be cruel to be kind.” This statement by Hamlet seems

contradictory at first. How can an individual treat others kindly even when he is cruel? However, Hamlet is referring to his mother and his intention to kill Claudius (his father’s brother [and murderer] and his mother’s husband) to avenge his father’s death. This act will be a tragedy for his mother, but Hamlet does not want her to be with his father’s murderer any longer; he believes that the murder will be good for his mother.

IRONY - Spend your entire political career fighting central banking and they'll put your face on their most circulated bill.

Irony, in its simple form, means a statement or event undermined by the context in which it occurs. Irony involves a difference or contrast between appearance and reality.Irony exposes and underscores a contrast between   A. what is and what seems to be   B. what is and what ought to be   C. what is and what one wishes to be   D. what is and what one expects to be

Andrew Jackson

There are three common types of irony in literature: 1. Verbal irony occurs when people say the opposite of what they

mean. This is perhaps the most common type of irony. The reader knows that a statement is ironic because of familiarity with the situation or a description of voice, facial, or bodily expressions which show the discrepancy.

• There are two kinds of verbal irony : • Understatement occurs when one minimizes the nature of something. • Overstatement occurs when one exaggerates the nature of something.

• Verbal irony in its most bitter and destructive form becomes sarcasm . • Someone is condemned by a speaker pretending to praise him or her.

2. In situational irony , the situation is different from what common sense indicates it is, will be, or ought to be.  Situational irony is often used to expose hypocrisy and injustice. (The pickpocket being pickpocketed).

3. Dramatic irony occurs when a character states something that they believe to be true but that the reader knows is not true. The key to dramatic irony is the reader's foreknowledge of coming events.

• Second readings of stories often increases dramatic irony because of knowledge that was not present in the first reading.

The following description of a wealthy husband’s sense of moral rectitude, from Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth (1905), is an example of an ironic statement.Once in the winter the rector would come to dine, and her husband would beg her to go over the list and see that no divorcées were included, except those who had showed signs of penitence by being remarried to the very wealthy (57).

Part of the ironic implication of this passage is that the husband is a hypocrite: he condemns divorce only if it is not followed by the acquisition of equal or greater wealth, so what he really condemns, under the guise of moral principles, is financial decline (Tyson)

New Criticism, however, primarily valued irony in a broader sense of the term, to indicate a text’s inclusion of varying perspectives on the same characters or events (Tyson)

Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811) offers us perspectives from which we may utterly condemn Willoughby for his treachery to Maryanne; forgive him because his behavior resulted from a combination of love, financial desperation, and a weakness of character which he himself laments; sympathize with him for the severity of the punishment his behavior has brought upon him; and see the ways in which Maryanne’s willful foolishness contributed to her own heartbreak.

Such a variety of possible viewpoints is considered a form of irony because the credibility of each viewpoint undermines to some extent the credibility of the others. The result is a complexity of meaning that mirrors the complexity of human experience and increases the text’s believability

AmbiguityAmbiguity occurs when a word, image, or event generates two or more different meanings.

Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) For example, in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), the

image of the tree produced by the scar tissue on Sethe’s back implies, among other things, suffering (the “tree” resulted from a brutal whipping, which is emblematic of all the hardships experienced under slavery), endurance (trees can live for hundreds of years, and the scar tissue itself testifies to Sethe’s remarkable ability to survive the most traumatic experiences), and renewal (like the trees that lose their leaves in the fall and are “reborn” every spring, Sethe is offered, at the novel’s close, the chance to make a new life).

In scientific or everyday language, ambiguity is usually considered a flaw because it’s equated with a lack of clarity and precision. In literary language, however, ambiguity is considered a source of richness, depth, and complexity that adds to the text’s value.

Tension Finally, the complexity of a literary text is created

by its tension, which, broadly defined, means the linking together of opposites. In its simplest form, tension is created by the integration of the abstract and the concrete, of general ideas embodied in specific images.

Tension in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman

For example, the concrete image of Willy’s tiny house, bathed in blue light and surrounded by enormous apartment buildings that emanate an angry orange glow, embodies the general idea of the underdog, the victim of forces larger and more numerous than itself. Similarly, the concrete image of Linda Loman singing Willy to sleep embodies the general idea of the devoted wife, the caretaker, the nurturer. Such concrete universals—or images and fictional characters that are meaningful on both the concrete level, where their meaning is literal and specific, and on the symbolic level, where they have universal significance—are considered a form of tension because they hold together the opposing realms of physical reality and symbolic reality in a way characteristic of literary language. In other words, the Loman home and the character of Linda Loman represent both themselves and something larger than themselves.

Tension is also created by the dynamic interplay among the text’s opposing tendencies, that is, among its paradoxes, ironies, and ambiguities (Tyson).

For example, we might say that the action of Death of a Salesman is structured by the tension between reality and illusion: between the harsh reality of Willy Loman’s life and the self-delusion into which he keeps trying to escape. Ideally, the text’s opposing tendencies are held in equilibrium by working together to make a stable and coherent meaning. For example, the tension between harsh reality and self-delusion in Death of a Salesman is held in equilibrium by the following meaning: so great is Willy’s desire to succeed as a salesman and a father that his only defense against the common man’s inevitable failures in a dog-eat-dog world is self-delusion, but that self-delusion only increases his failure. Thus, the play shows us how harsh reality and self-delusion feed off each other until the only escape is death.

ParadoxIronyAmbiguityTension

Let me ask you--

Can you explain these terms?

Take ten minutes to discuss your QHQs on Literature, Literary Theory, or New Criticism

In Groups

QHQs1. Q: New criticism does not allow readers to

interpret the text based on its cultural or social context. New criticism is the intrinsic way of understanding the literature; however, when we are analyzing symbols in the text, aren’t we interpreting them based on cultural backgrounds? Don’t we need to understand the cultural aspects to understand the symbolism?

2. Q: How is it possible for New Critics to agree on a single interpretation of “the text itself” (especially with the understanding that analysis itself is only possible through personal interpretation)?

1. Q: Does previous understanding or knowledge of where a literary work came from (time, culture, author, etc) deviate from the “true” application of New Criticism?

2. Q: Why does New Criticism continue to have a lasting influence on the way we read and write about literature?

3. Q: Why did the New Criticism’s practice of intrinsic criticism (identifying concepts of complexity and order to deem a text as a “great work”) ultimately become superseded by other schools of critical theories by the 1960s?

1. Q: Lois Tyson tells us that the main focus of New Criticism isn’t on the author’s intentions or the reader’s reaction. While it may be quite easy to circumvent finding out the author’s intentions, is it really possible to ignore the reader’s reaction? [I]f the reader’s reaction is to be ignored, does personal reflection truly not matter, and what are the consequences of that on comprehension?

2. Q: Why can’t we separate culture from literature?

3. Q: In Lois Tyson’s Critical Theory Today she mentions how, “New critics claimed, their interpretation stayed within the context created by the text itself.”(148), but why could there not be a strong focus on both the text itself and the author’s intention?

1. Q: When is the best moment to use New Criticism? [S]hould readers’ interpretations and authors’ intentions should be the same?

2. Q: [I]s it more important to understand the piece in the way the author intended or is it more important to interpret one’s own significant meaning from the piece in front of you?

3. Q: In chapter 5 of Critical Theory Today, Tyson says “The author’s letters, diaries, and essays were combed for evidence of authorial intention” (136). This was the common way to look for the meaning in the author’s text. Could this really be an accurate way to find out an author’s intention?

1.Q: Although New Critics believed that literary language and scientific language are different, what makes the two similar?

2.Q: How can we effectively determine what the most appropriate literary criticism is for any given text?

3.Q: Does analyzing a text first through a New Critical lens allow for a deeper and more thorough understanding of other critical theories?

Which major school of literary theory interests you and why?

What might literary theory serve to reveal about a literary text that traditional criticism cannot?

Let me ask you--

The Online Hour A hybrid class meets both in the classroom and

electronically. For this course, it means that we will meet twice a week for 1 hour and 50 minutes and that you will complete the remaining hour of this five unit course on your own, via a presentation on the website. This work must be completed and posted before our next meeting--preferably before Sunday at 4:00 pm. In order to complete the hour, you will simply go to the online presentation, in this case “Class #3, and work through the slides on your own. I will answer questions by email. We will do a brief review of the material when we meet on Mondays.

HomeworkReview the readings and ideas we have covered this week. Don’t forget to work through the online portion of the class. You can find it under “Presentations,” “Weeks 1-2” and “Class 3.”