新批判主义.pptVIP

A Brief Introduction to the New Criticism: Theory and Methodology PURPOSES I. To learn the background against which New Criticism emerged, flourished and faded; To know general theories of New Criticism and some representative figures; To understand the New Critics’ methodology. To have a brief survey of NC in China. I. The background against which New Criticism emerged, flourished and faded New Criticism and its growth A. New Criticism comes from John Crowe Ramson’s book bearing the same title The New Criticism (1941), in which he discussed the works of the four critics: I.A. Richards, William Empson, T.S. Eliot, and Yvor Winters. He regarded them as New Critics as they appreciated and evaluated literary works, poetry in particular, differently from previous critics. B. When in the 1920’s the New Criticism first emerged in public, it was limited to a small group of professors and students at Vanderbilt University (Nashville, Tennessee). In only two decades its principles, values and proceedings were to become so pervasive and so much embedded in the study of literature, that they were almost equated with the very nature and essence of the critical art. 2. Critical approaches before NC Until the early 1940’s the typical academic approaches in literature were historical, social, biographical, philosophical, psychological, mimetic, and moral, in any combination. 3. New Critics and their desire A. The traditional critics took into account extra-textual considerations and/or separated the form of the art object from its meaning, refusing to regard the work as an integrated art-form. Ramson tried to distinguish between science and poetry, and then dismisses two traditional approaches to poetry, the “psychological” and the “moralistic.” B. One central idea of New critics To New Critics, unity of the literary work is the intrinsic basis of all. They argued that the most mature literary art was not content to associate li