New Criticism.ppt

New Criticism: Theory and Practice I -- Poetry Outline New Criticism: Assumptions New Criticism: Methodologies Example 1: “A Slumber did My Spirit Seal” Example 2: “This is Just to Say”: an Intrinsic (New Critical) Analysis and an Extrinsic one. New Criticism: in Historical Context Starting Questions Autonomy: Do you think that great writers such as Shakespeare and Milton can transcend their time and space? How about a text? Can a text present universal experiences and speak to people of different ages in the same way? How about you? To what extent can you determine your life and its meanings? Textual Unity: Is it always possible to find in a text unity of form and content, or of its different parts? How do you deal with its contradictions? Objective reading: Is objective reading of a poem possible? Is it possible to not involve your personal experience? New Criticism:  Major Assumptions (text pp. 41-42 ) A poem is an autonomy (獨立個體), its meanings decided by itself alone, but not by the author’s intention or the reader’s emotional responses to it. Intentional Fallacy (意圖謬誤), Affective Fallacy (感情謬誤) Poetry offers a different kind of truth (poetic truth) than science, conveyed through its dense language which cannot be translated. Heresy of Paraphrase Major Assumptions —Textual Autonomy the poet‘s mind as a catalyst (觸媒) objective correlative 客觀對應物 (T.S. Eliot) An external object used to convey the writer’s feeling, which is elevated to a universal level in writing and the use of objective correlatives. “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.” (“Hamlet and His Problems”) object