20140101252 任雪琴
Introduction to Anglo-American New Criticism
  In this introduction part, it mainly talks about the development of Anglo-American New Criticism. While Russian Formalism was in popular in Russian, there was also a similar literary movement in Europe and America, and that is Anglo-American New Criticism. They both kept literary form as the only proper target of literary criticism. At the beginning of twentieth century, there were many other critical traditions in Europe and America, such as symbolism, expressionism, aestheticism, which can be regarded as the foundation of the emersion of Anglo-American New Criticism. According to the textbook, I think we can divide this part into three parts: the origin period, development period and climax period.
Origin Period
In the first period, T.S. Eliot published an article “Tradition and the individual Talent”, which is regarded as the preface of New Criticism. He emphasized that poets should not put their
personal emotions into the poet, which is called “depersonalization”. They should express the literary media- text, the language itself rather than personal emotions. Personally, I like his saying that the wiser the artist is, the clearer he could separate his personal emotions and his creative works. Somehow, I am not that kind of person who is easily affected by sorrow or happiness in novels or drama, for I always think those in literary works is created by artists, and it is not worth to show real emotion. In my opinion, if 汪小敏资料the artist put his personal emotions in his works, the audience might distract their attention to the artist, and neglect the real value of works.
There is another critic in the first period named I.A.Richards. In his article Principles of Literary Criticism, he first defined poetic language in terms of pseudo-statement as opposed to scientific language. He also stated that language has four functions, which are sense, feeling, tone and intention and poetic language is distinguished for its appeal to “feeling”.
Development Period
继承者们歌曲Then it comes to a second period. By the 1930s, William Empson put forward a way to criticize. In his Seven Types of Ambiguity, he defined ambiguity as any slight difference in vocabulary can cause different response to the same language.
Meanwhile, Allen Tate proposed the concept of “tension” during this period. He concluded good poem is the furthest extremes of intension and extension. Here, intension refers to the implication or the emotions attached on the poem; extension refers to the literal meaning or lexical meaning of words. The former criticism like aestheticism and symbolism emphasize the intension sense; however, Allen Tate focuses more on extension sense.
Another important critic is John Crowe Ranson. He gave the New Criticism its name and he called for an “ontological criticism”. He claimed that ontology is about poetry itself, rather physical poetry or simple ideas. Ontology mainly talks about what makes literature has literariness. To answer what is literariness, he pointed out that literariness is non-prose.
张敬轩 出柜
Climax Period
Then it comes to the climax period. William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C.Beardsley criticized fallacy from two aspects. First, they emphasized that writer’s intention can not be used as the evidence of criticism, for intention is fleeting and sometimes even the writer can not grasp it well. Second, they believed that great works are not the way to express writer’s personal emotions, but to express the time of certain era and the common human’s emotions through all the times. 郑秀妍偷郑秀晶的钱The great effect of these two critics is that after their criticism on fallacy, few critics would talk about the author.
During this period, another critic, Cleanth Brooks, proposed a new concept “paradox”. He defined “paradox” as a feature of poetry language, and光辉岁月mtv it refers to something looks absurd, but real in fact. This kind of technique put those familiar but old things under the new perspective, and it is kind of similar to “defamiliarlism ” in Russian Formalism. Another New Critical concept is “irony”. Brooks defined it as the opposition of the literary meaning and implication meaning, which distorts the meaning of certain context; however,
it is exactly this kind of distortion that makes poetry achieve the balance and unity.
Another influential critic is Rene Wellek. Although he did not put forward any famous New Critic terms, he summarized the New Critical thought. In Theory of Literature, he put forward Internal Study and External Study, and the advocate treat literature works as independent objects, and pays attention to the structure of literature works rather than put literature under other subjects.
玄彬退役
In summary, the way New Criticism used is closing reading. One important thing worth to remember is that its emergence is kind of react to the real politics, which makes it distinguished from Russian Formalism.
Introduction to Structuralism
As to the origination of structuralism is concerned, the textbook first talked about the change of human’s cognition of language: language study was “philosophy”, and language, from the philosophical perspective, concerns the nature of meaning; language i
s no longer the product of thinking, but the precondition of thinking, and to a large degree, it even controls and determines how human think. This conceptual revolution was initialed by Saussure. Before Saussure, people regard language is a reflection of the material world, the change of the object real world determines the change of language. However, Saussure first breaks off the relationship between language signs and material world. He defined linguistic sign as the signifier, concept or sound-image aroused by the signifier as signified, and the things related to material world as referent. He further pointed out that in different languages, the signifier is different; therefore, linguistic sign is arbitrary. It does not mean that human can choose signifiers arbitrarily, but they need follow certain rules. At this point, he stated that the meaning of language can only exist in the internal of language. The interaction of linguistic elements can produce langue meaning. In language, the difference between linguistic signs composes the symbol itself. He concluded that only the difference exists in language. Based on this difference theory, Saussure developed structuralism.