what is a new criticism essay

Literary Analysis

New criticism.

New Criticism was a formalist movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object. The movement derived its name from John Crowe Ransom’s 1941 book The New Criticism . Also very influential were the critical essays of T. S. Eliot, such as “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and “Hamlet and His Problems,” in which Eliot developed his notion of the “objective correlative.” Eliot’s evaluative judgments, such as his condemnation of Milton and Shelley, his liking for the so-called metaphysical poets and his insistence that poetry must be impersonal, greatly influenced the formation of the New Critical canon.

New Critics believed the structure and meaning of the text were intimately connected and should not be analyzed separately. In order to bring the focus of literary studies back to analysis of the texts, they aimed to exclude the reader’s response, the author’s intention, historical and cultural contexts, and moralistic bias from their analysis.

The hey-day of the New Criticism in American high schools and colleges was the Cold War decades between 1950 and the mid-seventies, doubtless because it offered a relatively straightforward and politically uncontroversial approach to the teaching of literature. Brooks and Warren’s Understanding Poetry and Understanding Fiction both became staples during this era.

Studying a passage of prose or poetry in New Critical style required careful, exacting scrutiny of the passage itself. Formal elements such as rhyme, meter, setting, characterization, and plot were used to identify the theme of the text. In addition to the theme, the New Critics also looked for paradox, ambiguity,irony, and tension to help establish the single best and most unified interpretation of the text.

Although the New Criticism is no longer a dominant theoretical model in American universities, some of its methods (like close reading) are still fundamental tools of literary criticism, underpinning a number of subsequent theoretic approaches to literature including poststructuralism, deconstruction theory, and reader-response theory.

• For an overview, see Gerald Graff, Professing Literature, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987. ↵
• New Criticism. Provided by : Wikipedia. Located at : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Criticism . License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike
• Image of woman staring at empty frame. Authored by : Byron Barrett. Located at : https://flic.kr/p/82z85F . License : CC BY-NC-ND: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives

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• New Criticism

New criticism is all about existing in the present moment, as it encourages a style of criticism that focuses only on what can be seen on the pages of the text. No more need to study the historical context, biographical data and philosophical contribution of a text to what it means. All that matters is the text itself! 

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But what exactly is new criticism? Let us look at the definition, theory and of new criticism, alongside an example and a few notable critics that contributed to this movement.

New criticism: definition

The definition of new criticism is as follows:

New Criticism: A style of criticism that emphasizes the close reading of texts as a self-contained piece of work capable of producing independent meaning, without the accompaniment of any philosophical, historical or biographical context surrounding the text.

New criticism believes in analysing the value of literary works based only on the text itself, without taking into account the following:

The author's background or intentions while writing the text

The reader's emotional or physical response to the text

The social, economic, political or historical context of the text

The moral or philosophical importance of the text

Once the context of the text has been removed, the meaning and value of the text should only rely on what is seen on the page. This means focusing the literary study on the text's aesthetic qualities, such as its

Language and tone

• Literary devices and techniques

Characterisation

Symbols and metaphors

Actual setting (not context)

New criticism focuses on how something is being said, not why , to determine what is being said.

New criticism: theory

New criticism arose as a literary theory in the 20th century as a response to traditional styles of literary criticism in America that placed more emphasis on the external factors surrounding a text, rather than the text itself. These old literary schools believed that the meaning of the text is reliant on its author's biography , its historical and cultural context and the philosophical or moral importance of the text.

However, New Critics believed that this approach was too distracting, subjective and emotional. They believed that art should be enjoyed simply for art's sake, rather than ascribing a greater socio-political, moral or didactic purpose to the text. Hence they came up with a far more systematic and objective way of studying literary texts.

Intentional Fallacy

New Critics believed that failure to view a text independently can lead to Intentional Fallacy.

Intentional Fallacy: The false notion that the author's intentions affect the interpretation of a text.

The reality is that while interpreting a text, the critic (or reader) has no idea what the author's true intentions were while producing the text. In some cases, the meaning of a text may not live up to the author's intentions, while in others it may be far more complex and meaningful than the author originally intended. Hence, the author's intentions should be of no relevance and should not have any bearing on the meaning of the text.

the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the . . . work of literary art. 1

Affective Fallacy

A similar notion called Affective Fallacy was also introduced by New Critics as something that should be avoided during literary analysis.

Affective Fallacy: The malpractice of taking into consideration the emotional and psychological reactions of the reader while interpreting a text.

Every reader may interpret a text differently, and there is no way a critic can have access to readers' response that is free of personal biases, unified and constant. Therefore, they should not confuse the meaning of a text with the reader's reaction.

New criticism: example

To better understand New criticism, let us apply this style of criticism to analyse a text. For this example, we will be analysing F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby (1925).

The Great Gatsby is set during the Jazz Age (1920-1930) in America, the period following the end of the First World War. A sudden rise in the national economy led to an era characterised by extravagance, opulence and social mobility. However, under the glittering surface, this period was also characterised by the relaxation of social and moral values, materialism and the stratification of society into the rich and working classes. The Eighteenth Amendment (1919) banning the sale of alcohol resulted in massive bootlegging businesses. The Jazz Age eventually came to an end with the Great Depression in 1929.

When viewed in this context, Fitzgerald's novel can be viewed as a criticism of the American Dream in the 1920s. Gatsby's driving force in the novel , his love interest Daisy, represents wealth, sophistication and aristocracy - the very promise of the American Dream. Winning her heart, therefore, represents part of Gatsby's quest to climb the social ladder and chase the American Dream.

Throughout the novel, Gatsby continues to blindly pursue Daisy, resorting to illegal activities to meet her standards. Despite all his efforts, she ultimately chooses her husband and 'old money' social status. Therefore, the relationship between Gatsby and Daisy represents the hollowness of the American Dream that lures honest and ambitious men into craving materialism, easy money, immorality and empty happiness.

American Dream: An ideal that endorses the idea that the United States is a country where all people are afforded equal opportunities to pursue prosperity, freedom and happiness.

However, a new critic would view The Great Gatsby (1925) without paying heed to the social and cultural context of the Jazz Age. When The Great Gatsby is analyzed through a new criticism lens, Gatsby's rise to a self-made businessman, his relationship with Daisy, and his tragic downfall are seen as exactly as what it is; a man's blind pursuit of unrequited love and the sacrifices he is willing to make along the way. Similarly, Gatsby's fixation with recreating his past relationship with Daisy represents the common human condition of longing for unfulfilled dreams and wanting to freeze time to happier, simpler times.

In this analysis, the context of the Jazz Age and the American Dream are removed while deriving the novel's meaning, and the text is seen as a love story gone wrong. Therefore, by viewing the story from the eyes of a New Critic, The Great Gatsby reveals much more about the human condition than acting as socio-political commentary. A New Critic then derives a text's meaning without looking at its context.

New criticism critics

Here are two notable critics who helped form the basis of the new criticism movement in the early 20th century.

Ivor Armstrong Richards (1893-1979)

The work of English critic I. A. Richards greatly contributed to the foundations of new criticism.

In 1929, Richards published Practical Criticism, a book that took a scientific-empirical approach towards literary criticism. He conducted a study where he asked undergraduate students at Cambridge University to analyse 13 poems without giving them contextual details such as their author, date of publication, and historical and cultural background.

The resultant interpretations produced by the pupils demonstrated the depth of meaning that could be derived from literary analyses when looking at the text alone. This established a new methodology for interpreting literary texts, which later became known as new criticism.

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)

American poet T. S. Eliot greatly influenced the new criticism movement through his critical essays, particularly “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1917) and “ Hamlet and His Problems” (1919).

In his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent", Eliot suggested that the only context in which we should view art is the context of the artist's previous works. This is because when an artist creates new work, they are carrying the aesthetic traditions of their previous works.

This contributed to the new criticism movement by endorsing the idea that art should be viewed only in the context of other art, rather than its historical, biographical or philosophical contexts that have no certified influence on the meaning of the text.

Even though the foundations of new Criticism had already been laid in the early 20th century, the movement was first coined in John Crowe Ransom’s The New Criticism (1941), which loosely outlines the principles of analysing literature by only looking at its text.

Importance of new criticism

New criticism certainly allows a far more systematic and objective way of studying literary texts. It ensures that the meaning of the text does not stray too far away from the text itself. The value of a text is in no way overly influenced by assumptions about the author's intentions, the reader's responses, or the historical and cultural context surrounding the work.

However, new criticism also serves a greater purpose. It introduced a style of literary criticism that is democratic in nature. This is because, according to New Critics, anyone with access to and interest in literature has equal power to criticise it. One does not require years of research and a variety of sources about the author's life, historical background, socio-political context etc. to criticise and appreciate literature. All that is needed is the text itself! Therefore, new criticism made literary criticism easier and more accessible.

New Criticism - Key takeaways

New criticism is a style of criticism that emphasizes the close reading of texts as a self-contained piece of work capable of producing independent meaning and excludes any philosophical, historical or biographical context surrounding the text.

• According to New criticism, the meaning and value of the text should only rely on what is seen on the page. This means focusing the literary study on the text's aesthetic qualities, such as its form, structure, language, characters etc.

Prominent New Critics include:

New criticism allows a far more systematic, objective and democratic way of studying literary texts

• William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, 'The Intentional Fallacy' (1946)

Flashcards inNew Criticism 10

What is new criticism?

New Criticism is a   style of criticism that emphasizes the close reading of texts as a self-contained piece of work capable of producing independent meaning and excludes any philosophical, historical or biographical context surrounding the text.

What does New Criticism NOT take into account while analysing a text?

New Criticism believes in analysing the value of literary works based only on the text itself, without taking into account the following: 

The   social, economic, political or historical context of the text

What does New Criticism take into account while analysing a text?

New Criticism takes into account only what is seen   on the page. This means focusing the literary study on the text's aesthetic qualities, such as its

Language and   tone

Literary devices and techniques 

Actual   setting   (not context)

What is the origin of New Criticism?

Even though the foundations of New Criticism had already been laid in the early 20th century, the movement was first coined in John Crowe Ransom’s  The New Criticism   (1941), which loosely outlines the principles of analysing literature by only looking at its text. 

How did I.V. Richards contribute to the foundations of New Criticism?

In 1929, Richards published   Practical Criticism,  a book that took a scientific-empirical approach towards literary criticism. He conducted a study where he asked undergraduate students at Cambridge University to analyse 13 poems without giving them contextual details such as their author, date of publication, and historical and cultural background. The resultant interpretations produced by the pupils demonstrated the depth of meaning that could be derived from literary analyses when looking at the text alone. This established a new methodology for interpreting literary texts, which later became known as New Criticism. 

Why do New Critics believe in Intentional Fallacy?

New Critics believe in Intentional Fallacy as  the critic (or reader) has no idea what the author's true intentions were while producing the text.  In some cases, the meaning of a text may not live up to the author's intentions, while in others it may be far more complex and meaningful than the author originally intended.   Hence, the author's intentions should be of no relevance and should not have any bearing on the meaning of the text. 

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Frequently Asked Questions about New Criticism

How to analyse a poem using new criticism?

To analyse a poem using new criticism, simply set aside the context of the poem and focus only on the following:

Structure 

Literary devices and techniques 

What was the main focus of the new criticism?

The text is the main focus of New Criticism. New Criticism focuses on  how something is being said, not why , to determine what is being said. 

Even though the origins (or foundations) of New Criticism had already been laid in the early 20th century, the movement was first coined in John Crowe Ransom’s The New Criticism (1941), which loosely outlines the principles of analysing literature by only looking at its text. 

What is an example of a new criticism critic?

Examples of prominent New Critics include:

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2.2: The Foundations of New Criticism: An Overview

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John Donne (1572–1631), the great metaphysical poet, provides a metaphor that is useful for close reading. In “The Canonization” (1633) he writes:

We’ll build sonnets pretty rooms;

As well a well-wrought urn becomes

The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs,

And by these hymns, all shall approve

Us canonized for Love.John Donne, “The Canonization,” Poetry Foundation, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173353 .

Another poet returns to the same metaphor 118 years later. Thomas Gray, in “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751), writes:

Can storied urn or animated bust

Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Courtyard,” Poetry Foundation, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173564 .

Both Donne and Gray use the image of the urn in their poetry. An urn , according to the Oxford English Dictionary ( OED ), is “an earthenware or metal vessel or vase of a rounded or ovaloid form and with a circular base, used by various peoples especially in former times…to preserve the ashes of the dead. Hence vaguely used (esp. poet .) for ‘a tomb or sepulchre, the grave.’” Oxford English Dictionary , s.v. “urn.” Donne and Gray use the urn poetically, or metaphorically, for the urn is an image, a container to hold poetic meaning. To Donne, the poet can “build sonnets pretty rooms; / As well a well-wrought urn becomes”; to Gray the urn becomes “storied” or an “animated bust” capable of containing stories and meaning. As an image, then, the urn becomes symbolic: poets argue that a poem is like an urn, a container for artistic meaning.

Let’s add one final component to our urn image. Jump ahead another sixty-nine years from Gray’s poem and read John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1820). At the end of this poem, Keats writes:

When old age shall this generation waste,

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in The Oxford Book of English Verse , ed. Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1919; Bartleby.com, 1999), http://www.bartleby.com/101/625.html .

Donne’s “ well-wrought urn ” became the title of a book by Cleanth Brooks— The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947)Cleanth Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1956).—a central manifesto of the New Criticism. New Criticism is synonymous with close reading, so the urn becomes an important symbol for the New Critics: the urn as artistic container of beauty and meaning represents the New Critical enterprise. A poem, a play, a novel, a short story is like a “storied urn” or “well-wrought urn,” capable of conveying poetic beauty and truth. Even if the poem is “Jabberwocky”!

In all likelihood, you have already practiced New Criticism , the close reading of a poem, short story, or longer narrative that focuses on the unity of that work. When you examine a short story for its character development, a drama for its plot construction, or a poem for its imagery, you are reading as a New Critic, looking at the literary work through the lens of close reading. In a sense, New Critical close reading is at the heart of every form of literary analysis you do, regardless of the theoretical approach taken. Thus it becomes essential that you become proficient in close readings of texts, for this skill is the foundation of all forms of literary criticism. If you cannot read a text closely and analyze it, you will have difficulty reading from any critical perspective.

Your Process

• List the papers, if any, you have written in high school or college using the close reading approach.
• Describe your experience writing such papers.
• What challenges or questions do you remember having as you were working on these papers?
• On which literary work have you decided to write your paper?
• What are the fundamental questions you have about this work?

Focus on New Critical Strategies

The New Critics, as we discussed, regard a literary work as an urn —a well-wrought, storied urn, or a Grecian urn. As Keats writes, this urn contains not only beauty but also truth: a work of literature has some objective meaning that is integral to its artistic design. In other words, literature is the art of conveying truth about the world. Thus the New Critics view the study of literature as an inherently valuable enterprise; literary criticism, it follows, is fruitful because it clarifies art by assigning a truth value to this art. To quote the nineteenth-century poet and critic Matthew Arnold, as he writes in The Function of Criticism at the Present Time (1865), literature reflects “the best that is known and thought in the world.”Matthew Arnold, Function of Criticism in the Present Time (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2010) . To the New Critics, as you can see, literature—in particular the analysis of it—was a profound activity.

A central concern of the New Critics is to understand how meaning and form interweave into a total artistic effect, the well-wrought urn. A New Critical reading assumes that the literary work has an organic structure that leads to unity or harmony in the work. An important concern for New Critics, consequently, is to show how meaning is achieved or dependent on the organic structure—the form—of the work. A New Critical reading, then, focuses on the various elements of literature that complement and create the theme.

Basic Philosophy of Close Reading

A New Critic’s toolbox will hold those elements of literature that allow for the discussion of form and technique as it applies to meaning. Since New Critics perform a close reading of the text to illustrate how structure and theme are inseparable, they are eager to tell us both how to read and how not to read. They identify various fallacies of reading that must be avoided:

The Intentional Fallacy

The intentional fallacy occurs when readers claim to understand an author’s intended meaning for a work of literature. The New Critics believed that a literary work belongs to the readers, to the public, which suggests that we should read the work isolated from what the author may have said about the work. In other words, the critic never knows specifically what the author intended. Indeed, an author may have conveyed meanings he or she did not intend at all, but those meanings are still present in their work. The literary critic, then, must concentrate solely on the extrinsic formal qualities of the poem, play, short story, or novel.

The Biographical Fallacy

Related to the intentional fallacy is the biographical fallacy , which, as you might suspect, is committed when you use an author’s life as a frame of reference to interpret a work of art. The New Critics took painstaking measures to keep the focus on the work of art itself.

The Affective Fallacy

The affective fallacy is produced when the critic brings in his or her personal feelings about how a literary work moves them. While New Critics were aware that many readers found meaning in the emotional impact of literature, they were careful to distinguish between subjective emotional responses and objective critical statements about a literary work. Critics, then, should stick closely to the work of art, eliminating the author’s intention from consideration, and they should also eliminate their emotional involvement in the reading experience. We discover later in our study that many critical theories—psychoanalytic and reader-response theories, in particular—are diametrically opposed to New Criticism: both psychoanalytic and reader-response theories highlight the way a literary work affects a reader’s emotional and intellectual responses.

The Heresy of Paraphrase

Finally, the New Critics warned against the heresy of paraphrase , which happens when readers artificially separate meaning from structure or form. You have probably fallen into this trap once or twice when you concentrated on summarizing a work’s plot rather than analyzing its meaning. New Criticism teaches us not to assign a meaning to a literary work unless that meaning can be supported by a close examination of the artistic elements of the text. To say that Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is about the death of a migrant worker fails to acknowledge that the poem does not support such a reading. Humpty Dumpty, in fact, could be accused of the heresy of paraphrase, as Amy Chisnell explores in her student paper later in the chapter.

In review, a close reading, as defined by the New Critics, focuses narrowly on the literary work as a well-wrought urn. All we need for our interpretation is the literary work itself, where we examine how the artistry of the work leads to a larger theme that reflects the truth value of the work. Easy to state, more difficult to do! So let’s now turn to see how a close reading can be connected to the writing process itself.

• How do you react to such rules that define the philosophy of New Critical close reading?
• What do you see as the strengths to such an approach?
• What do you see as some of the limits to this approach?

The Writing Process and the Protocols of Close Reading

If New Critics provide us with so many strategies for not reading a text, they should present us with strategies for reading texts. And they do. They suggest protocols of reading that are the heart of traditional close readings of texts. In a nutshell, a close reading exposes a problem or issue that needs examination to bring unity to the work; a close reading demonstrates how a literary work’s meaning is unified, balanced, and harmonized by its aesthetic—or literary—structure. Your close reading, then, often identifies a tension or ambiguity —the issue or problem—that can be resolved by showing that the literary work achieves unity even in the apparent tension or ambiguity. Consequently, the critic can often examine how language creates tension through paradox or irony . Paradox (when something appears contradictory or discordant, but finally proves to be actually true) and irony (when a perceived meaning or intention is eventually found not to be accurate) are a result of a writer’s use of language in a metaphorical way.

• Read Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” ( http://www.bartleby.com/101/625.html ).
• Examine the last two lines of the poem (49–50).
• Do you think the urn is speaking the lines at the end? Does it matter?
• Read Cleanth Brooks’s interpretation of the ending lines ( www.mrbauld.com/keatsurn.html ).
• Then read the following overview.

There is no more famous example of a professional critical reading than Cleanth Brooks’s “Keats’s Sylvan Historian: History without Footnotes.”Cleanth Brooks, “Keats’s Sylvan Historian: History without Footnotes,” Mr. Bauld’s English, www.mrbauld.com/keatsurn.html . You can access the essay at www.mrbauld.com/keatsurn.html .

Brooks’s reading of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” begins by disagreeing with T. S. Eliot, who believed the concluding lines of the poem—“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—constituted a major flaw in the poem, for, as Brooks relates, “the troubling assertion is apparently an intrusion upon the poem—does not grow out of it—is not dramatically accommodated to it.”Cleanth Brooks, “Keats’s Sylvan Historian: History without Footnotes,” Mr. Bauld’s English, www.mrbauld.com/keatsurn.html . Eliot feels the urn’s speech doesn’t make much sense—and that the statement simply isn’t true. Brooks sets out to counter Eliot and prove that the poem is unified around the central paradox of the poem: “What is the relation of the beauty (the goodness, the perfection) of a poem to the truth or falsity of what it seems to assert?”

Brooks contends that the poem is “a parable on the nature of poetry, and of art in general” and that the concluding lines must be taken in the “total context of the poem.”Cleanth Brooks, “Keats’s Sylvan Historian: History without Footnotes,” Mr. Bauld’s English, www.mrbauld.com/keatsurn.html . When read in this manner, the urn’s speech was “‘in character,’ was dramatically appropriate, [and] was properly prepared for.”Cleanth Brooks, “Keats’s Sylvan Historian: History without Footnotes,” Mr. Bauld’s English, www.mrbauld.com/keatsurn.html . To support his contention, Brooks provides a stanza-by-stanza close reading in which he suggests that the paradox of the speaking urn is naturally part of each stanza and related to a key thematic concept: the poem highlights the tension between bustling life depicted on the urn and the frozen vignettes of the “Cold Pastoral.” Brooks concludes, “If the urn has been properly dramatized, if we have followed the development of the metaphors, if we have been alive to the paradoxes which work throughout the poem, perhaps then, we shall be prepared for the enigmatic, final paradox which the ‘silent form’ utters.’”Cleanth Brooks, “Keats’s Sylvan Historian: History without Footnotes,” Mr. Bauld’s English, www.mrbauld.com/keatsurn.html . In concluding his essay, Brooks warns readers not to fall into the trap of paraphrase, for we must ultimately focus on “the world-view, or ‘philosophy,’ or ‘truth’ of the poem as a whole in terms of its dramatic wholeness” (Brooks’s emphasis).Cleanth Brooks, “Keats’s Sylvan Historian: History without Footnotes,” Mr. Bauld’s English, www.mrbauld.com/keatsurn.html .

Brooks’s reading of Keats’s ode is an exemplar of New Critical reading. Remember, a close reading will examine a literary work and find some objective meaning (a theme) that is harmonized with structure, thus balancing theme and form.

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Uncategorized › The American New Critics

The American New Critics

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 17, 2016 • ( 1 )

American New Criticism, emerging in the 1920s and especially dominant in the 1940s and 1950s, is equivalent to the establishing of the new professional criticism in the emerging discipline of ‘English’ in British higher education during the inter-war period. As always, origins and explanations for its rise – in its heyday to almost hegemonic proportions – are complex and finally indefinite, but some suggestions may be sketched in. First, a number of the key figures were also part of a group called the Southern Agrarians, or ‘Fugitives’, a traditional, conservative, Southern-oriented movement which was hostile to the hard-nosed industrialism and materialism of a United States dominated by ‘the North’. Without stretching the point too far, a consanguinity with Arnold, Eliot and, later, Leavis in his  opposition to modern ‘inorganic’ civilization may be discerned here.

Second, New Criticism’s high point of influence was during the Second World War and the Cold War succeeding it, and we may see that its privileging of literary texts (their ‘order’, ‘harmony’ and ‘transcendence’ of the historically and ideologically determinate) and of the ‘impersonal’ analysis of what makes them great works of art (their innate value lying in their superiority to material history: see below Cleanth Brooks’s essay about Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’) might represent a haven for alienated intellectuals and, indeed, for whole generations of quietistic students. Third, with the huge expansion of the student population in the States in this period, catering for second-generation products of the American ‘melting pot’, New Criticism with its ‘practical criticism’ basis was at once pedagogically economical (copies of short texts could be distributed equally to everyone) and also a way of coping with masses of individuals who had no ‘history’ in common. In other words, its ahistorical, ‘neutral’ nature – the study only of ‘the words on the page’ – was an apparently equalizing, democratic activity appropriate to the new American experience.

But whatever the socio-cultural explanations for its provenance, New Criticism is clearly characterized in premise and practice: it is not concerned with context – historical, biographical, intellectual and so on; it is not interested in the ‘fallacies’ of ‘intention’ or ‘affect’; it is concerned solely with the ‘text in itself’, with its language and organization; it does not seek a text’s ‘meaning’, but how it ‘speaks itself’ (see Archibald MacLeish’s poem ‘Ars Poetica’, itself a synoptic New Critical document, which opens: ‘A poem must not mean/But be’); it is concerned to trace how the parts of the text relate, how it achieves its ‘order’ and ‘harmony’, how it contains and resolves ‘irony’, ‘paradox’, ‘tension’, ‘ambivalence’ and ‘ambiguity’; and it is concerned essentially with articulating the very ‘poem-ness’ – the formal quintessence – of the poem itself (and it usually is a poem – but see Mark Schorer and Wayne Booth, below).

An early, founding essay in the self-identification of New Criticism is John Crowe Ransom’s ‘Criticism, Inc.’ (1937). (His book on Eliot, Richards and others, entitled The New Criticism, 1941, gave the movement its name.) Ransom, one of the ‘Fugitives’ and editor of the Kenyon Review 1939–59, here lays down the ground rules: ‘Criticism, Inc.’ is the ‘business’ of professional – professors of literature in the universities in particular; criticism should become ‘more scientific, or precise and systematic’; students should ‘study literature, and not merely about literature’; Eliot was right to denounce romantic literature as ‘imperfect in objectivity, or “aesthetic distance”’; criticism is not ethical, linguistic or historical studies, which are merely ‘aids’; the critic should be able to exhibit not the ‘prose core’ to which a poem may be reduced but ‘the differentia, residue, or tissue, which keeps the object poetical or entire. The character of the poem resides for the good critic in its way of exhibiting the residuary quality.’

Many of these precepts are given practical application in the work of Cleanth Brooks, himself also a ‘Fugitive’, professional academic, editor of the Southern Review (with Robert Penn Warren) 1935–42, and one of the most skilled and exemplary practitioners of the New Criticism. His and Warren’s textbook anthologies, Understanding Poetry (1938) and Understanding Fiction (1943), are often regarded as having spread the New Critical doctrine throughout generations of American university literature students, but his most characteristic book of close readings is the significantly titled The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947), in which the essay on the eponymous urn of Keats’s Ode, ‘Keats’s Sylvan Historian: History Without Footnotes’ (1942), is in our view the best exemplification, explicitly and implicitly, of New Critical practice one could hope to find. Brooks at once quotes the opening of MacLeish’s ‘Ars Poetica’ (see above); refers to Eliot and his notion of the ‘objective correlative’; rejects the relevance of biography; reiterates throughout the terms ‘dramatic propriety’, ‘irony’, ‘paradox’ (repeatedly) and ‘organic context’; performs a bravura reading of the poem which leaves its ‘sententious’ final dictum as a dramatically organic element of the whole; constantly admires the poem’s ‘history’ above the ‘actual’ histories of ‘war and peace’, of ‘our time-ridden minds’, of ‘meaningless’ ‘accumulations of facts’, of ‘the scientific and philosophical generalisations which dominate our world’; explicitly praises the poem’s ‘insight into essential truth’; and confirms the poem’s value to us (in 1942, in the midst of the nightmare of wartime history) precisely because, like Keats’s urn, it is ‘All breathing human passion far above’ – thus stressing ‘the ironic fact that all human passion does leave one cloyed; hence the superiority of art’.

As New Criticism is, by definition, a praxis, much of its ‘theory’ occurs along the way in more specifically practical essays (as with Brooks above) and not as theoretical writing (see below, also, for Leavis’s refusal to theorize his position or engage in ‘philosophical’ extrapolation). But there are two New Critical essays in particular which are overtly theoretical and which have become influential texts more generally in modern critical discourse: ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ (1946) and ‘The Affective Fallacy’ (1949), written by W. K. Wimsatt – a professor of English at Yale University and author of the symptomatically titled book, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (1954) – in collaboration with Monroe C. Beardsley, a philosopher of aesthetics. Both essays, influenced by Eliot and Richards, engage with the ‘addresser’ (writer) –‘message’ (text) –‘addressee’ (reader) nexus outlined in the Introduction, in the pursuit of an ‘objective’ criticism which abjures both the personal input of the writer (‘intention’) and the emotional effect on the reader (‘affect’) in order purely to study the ‘words on the page’ and how the artefact ‘works’. The first essay argues that ‘the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art’; that a poem ‘goes about the world beyond [the author’s] power to intend about it or control it’ – it ‘belongs to the public’; that it should be understood in terms of the ‘dramatic speaker’ of the text, not the author; and be judged only by whether it ‘works’ or not.

Much critical debate has since raged about the place of intention in criticism, and continues to do so: Wimsatt and Beardsley’s position strikes a chord, for example, with poststructuralist notions of the ‘death of the author’ and with deconstruction’s freeing of the text from ‘presence’ and ‘meaning’. But there the resemblance ends, for the New Critics still basically insist that there is a determinate, ontologically stable ‘poem itself’, which is the ultimate arbiter of its own ‘statement’, and that an ‘objective’ criticism is possible. This runs quite counter to deconstruction’s notion of the ‘iterability’ of a text in its multiplex ‘positioned’ rereadings. This difference becomes very much clearer in the second essay, which argues that the ‘affective fallacy’ represents ‘a confusion between the poem and its results’: ‘trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological effects of the poem . . . ends in impressionism and relativism’.

Opposing the ‘classical objectivity’ of New Criticism to ‘romantic reader psychology’, it asserts that the outcome of both fallacies is that ‘the poem itself, as an object of specifically critical judgement, tends to disappear’. And the importance of a poem in classic New Critical terms is that by ‘fixing emotions and making them more permanently perceptible’, by the ‘survival’ of ‘its clear and nicely interrelated meanings, its completeness, balance, and tension’, it represents ‘the most precise emotive report on customs’: ‘In short, though cultures have changed, poems remain and explain.’ Poems, in other words, are our cultural heritage, permanent and valuable artefacts; and therein lies the crucial difference from more contemporary theoretical positions.

As we have noted, New Criticism focused principally on poetry, but two essays by Mark Schorer, ‘Technique as Discovery’ (1948) and ‘Fiction and the Analogical Matrix’ (1949), mark the attempt to deploy New Critical practice in relation to prose fiction. In the first of these, Schorer notes: ‘Modern criticism has shown us that to speak of content as such is not to speak of art at all, but of experience; and that it is only when we speak of the achieved content, the form, the work of art as a work of art, that we speak as critics. The difference between content, or experience, and achieved content, or art, is technique.’ This, he adds, has not been followed through in regard to the novel, whose own ‘technique’ is language, and whose own ‘achieved content’ – or ‘discovery’ of what it is saying – can only, as with a poem, be analysed in terms of that ‘technique’. In the second essay, Schorer extends his analysis of the language of fiction by revealing the unconscious patterns of imagery and symbolism (way beyond the author’s ‘intention’) present in all forms of fiction and not just those which foreground a ‘poetic’ discourse. He shows how the author’s ‘meaning’, often contradicting the surface sense, is embedded in the matrix of linguistic analogues which constitute the text. In this we may see connections with later poststructuralist theories’ concern with the sub-texts, ‘silences’, ‘ruptures’, ‘raptures’ and ‘play’ inherent in all texts, however seemingly stable – although Schorer himself, as a good New Critic, does not deconstruct modern novels, but reiterates the coherence of their ‘technique’ in seeking to capture ‘the whole of the modern consciousness . . . the complexity of the modern spirit’. Perhaps it is, rather, that we should sense an affinity between the American New Critic, Schorer, and the English moral formalist, F. R. Leavis , some of whose most famous criticism of fiction in the 1930s and beyond presents ‘the Novel as Dramatic Poem’.

Finally, we should notice another American ‘movement’ of the midtwentieth century which was especially influential in the study of fiction: the so-called ‘Chicago School’ of ‘Neo-Aristotelians’. Theoretically offering a challenge to the New Critics but in fact often seen as only a New Critical ‘heresy’ in their analysis of formal structure and in their belief, with T. S. Eliot, that criticism should study ‘poetry as poetry and not another thing’, the Neo-Aristotelians were centred, from the later 1930s through the 1940s and 1950s, on R. S. Crane at the University of Chicago. Establishing a theoretical basis derived principally from Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics, Crane and his group sought to emulate the logic, lucidity and scrupulous concern with evidence found there; were worried by the limitations of New Critical practice (its rejection of historical analysis, its tendency to present subjective judgements as though they were objective, its concern primarily with poetry); and attempted therefore to develop a more inclusive and catholic criticism which would cover all genres and draw for its techniques, on a ‘pluralistic and instrumentalist’ basis, from whatever method seemed appropriate to a particular case. The anthology Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern (1952; abridged edition with Preface by Crane, 1957) contains many examples of their approach, including Crane’s own exemplary reading of Fielding’s Tom Jones, ‘The Concept of Plot and the Plot of Tom Jones’.

In effect, the Neo-Aristotelians were most influential in the study of narrative structure in the novel, and most particularly by way of the work of a slightly later critic, Wayne C. Booth, who nevertheless acknowledged that he was a Chicago Aristotelian. His book The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) has been widely read and highly regarded, although latterly contemporary critical theory has demonstrated its limitations and inadequacies . Booth’s project was to examine ‘the art of communicating with readers – the rhetorical resources available to the writer of epic, novel or short story as he tries, consciously or unconsciously, to impose his fictional world upon the reader’. Although accepting in New Critical terms that a novel is an ‘autonomous’ text, Booth develops a key concept with the notion that it nevertheless contains an authorial ‘voice’ – the ‘implied author’ (his or her ‘official scribe’ or ‘second self’) – whom the reader invents by deduction from the attitudes articulated in the fiction. Once this distinction between author and the ‘authorial voice’ is made, the way is open to analyse, in and for themselves, the many and various forms of narration which construct the text. A major legacy of Booth’s is his separating out of ‘reliable’ and ‘unreliable’ narrators – the former, usually in the third person, coming close to the values of the ‘implied author’; the latter, often a character within the story, a deviant from them. What Booth did was at once to enhance the formal equipment available for analysis of the ‘rhetoric of fiction’ and, paradoxically perhaps, to promote the belief that authors do mean to ‘impose’ their values on the reader and that ‘reliability’ is therefore a good thing. We may see here a consonance with the ‘moral formalism’ of Leavis, and the reason why poststructuralist narratology has gone beyond Booth.

  New Criticism Essay

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Morgan Spurlock, Documentarian Known for ‘Super Size Me,’ Dies at 53

His 2004 film followed Mr. Spurlock as he ate nothing but McDonald’s for a month. It was nominated for an Oscar, but it later came in for criticism.

By Clay Risen and Remy Tumin

Morgan Spurlock, a documentary filmmaker who gained fame with his Oscar-nominated 2004 film “ Super Size Me ,” which followed him as he ate nothing but McDonald’s for 30 days — but later stepped back from the public eye after admitting to sexual misconduct — died on Thursday in New York City. He was 53.

His brother Craig Spurlock said the cause was complications of cancer.

A self-described attention hound with a keen eye for the absurd, Mr. Spurlock was a playwright and television producer when he rocketed to global attention with “Super Size Me,” an early entry into the genre of gonzo participatory filmmaking that borrowed heavily from the confrontational style of Michael Moore and the up-close-and-personal influences of reality TV, which was then just emerging as a genre.

The film’s approach was straightforward: Mr. Spurlock would eat nothing but McDonald’s food for a month, and if a server at the restaurant offered to “supersize” the meal — that is, to give him the largest portion available for each item — he would accept.

The movie then follows Mr. Spurlock and his ever-patient girlfriend through his 30-day odyssey, splicing in interviews with health experts and visits to his increasingly disturbed physician. At the end of the month, he was 25 pounds heavier, depressed, puffy-faced and experiencing liver dysfunction.

The film, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival, grossed over $22 million, made Mr. Spurlock a household name, earned him an Academy Award nomination for best documentary and helped spur a sweeping backlash against the fast-food industry — though only temporarily ; today, McDonald’s has 42,000 locations worldwide, its stock is near an all-time high, and 36 percent of Americans eat fast food on any given day.

“His movie,” the critic A.O. Scott wrote in The New York Times , “goes down easy and takes a while to digest, but its message is certainly worth the loss of your appetite.”

The film became a touchstone in American culture. By making himself a part of the story, Mr. Spurlock could be considered a forerunner of TikTok influencers and citizen-journalist YouTubers.

And even after the backlash against fast food subsided, “Super Size Me” remained a staple in high school health classes and a reference point for taking personal responsibility for one’s own diet.

But the film also came in for subsequent criticism. Some people pointed out that Mr. Spurlock refused to release the daily logs tracking his food intake. Health researchers were unable to replicate his results in controlled studies.

And in 2017, he admitted that he had not been sober for more than a week at a time in 30 years — meaning that, in addition to his “McDonald’s only” diet, he was drinking, a fact that he concealed from his doctors and the audience, and that most likely skewed his results.

The admission came in a statement in which he also revealed multiple incidents of sexual misconduct, including an encounter in college that he described as rape, as well as repeated infidelity and the sexual harassment of an assistant at his production company, Warrior Poets.

The statement, which Mr. Spurlock posted on Twitter in 2017, came as he was gearing up for the release of a sequel to the film, “ Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! ” on YouTube Red.

He stepped down from his production company, and YouTube dropped the film; it was instead released in 2019 by Samuel Goldwyn Films.

Morgan Valentine Spurlock was born on Nov. 7, 1970, in Parkersburg, W.Va., and grew up in Beckley, W.Va. His father, Ben, owned and operated an auto-repair shop, and his mother, Phyllis (Valentine) Spurlock, was a junior high school and high school guidance counselor.

He later said he grew up as a fan of 1970s and ’80s British comedies like “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” and “Blackadder.”

“I was doing funny walks round the house at 6 or 7,” he told The Independent in 2012 .

He studied film at New York University and received a bachelor’s degree in fine arts in 1993, then began his career as a production assistant on film projects around New York City, beginning with Luc Besson’s “Léon: The Professional” (1994).

He also began writing plays, including “The Phoenix,” which won an award at the 1999 New York International Fringe Festival.

Mr. Spurlock’s first foray onto the screen was a proto-reality show called “I Bet You Will,” which was also one of the first web-only programs. In five-minute segments, he would dare people to do something gross, or humiliating, or both — eating a “worm burrito,” for example — in exchange for a wad of cash.

The show drew millions of viewers, as well as the interest of MTV, which bought the program a few months after it debuted.

During a Thanksgiving visit to his parents in 2002, Mr. Spurlock saw a TV news story about two women who had sued McDonald’s, claiming that the chain had misled them about the nutritional value of its hamburgers, fries and sodas and caused them to gain significant weight.

“A spokesman for McDonald’s came on and said, you can’t link their obesity to our food — our food is healthy, it’s nutritious,” he told The New York Times in 2004 . “I thought, ‘If it’s so good for me, I should be able to eat it every day, right?’”

And thus, “Super Size Me” was born.

Mr. Spurlock took to fame eagerly, and, with his wide smile and handlebar mustache, was hard to miss. He became an unofficial spokesman for the wellness movement, hobnobbed with celebrity chefs — and scrambled to find a new project.

He did not want to lose the momentum generated by “Super Size Me,” nor did he want to go down in history only as the guy who ate a lot of Big Macs.

“I’ll be that guy till I die,” he told The Independent.

A follow-up film, “Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?” (2008), was not nearly as well received. Critics assailed him for making light of an international terrorist and for oversimplifying complicated global politics. More bricks were thrown when it emerged that he had put himself at significant personal risk while in Pakistan while his wife was at home with their newborn son.

Eventually, he did get somewhat past the shadow of “Super Size Me”: He teamed up with the actors Jason Bateman and Will Arnett to explore the male grooming industry in “Mansome” (2012) and followed the band One Direction around, resulting in the film “One Direction: This Is Us” (2013).

He produced films by other documentarians, including “The Other F Word” (2011), directed by Andrea Blaugrund Nevins, about punk rockers who became fathers, and “A Brony Tale” (2014), directed by Brent Hodge, about the subculture known as Bronies — adults, mostly men, who love the animated series “My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.”

And he continued to make projects that leaned on the participatory style of “Super Size Me.” He created and starred in a series called “30 Days” for FX, in which a person, often Mr. Spurlock himself, would spend about a month embedded in a community much different from his own. One episode saw him spend 25 days in a Virginia jail.

Mr. Spurlock was married three times, to Priscilla Sommer, Alexandra Jamieson and Sara Bernstein; all three marriages ended in divorce. Along with his brother Craig, he is survived by another brother, Barry; his parents; and his sons, Laken and Kallen.

His decision to discuss his sexual past, which came at the height of the #Metoo movement, was met with a mix of praise and criticism. Though many people lauded him for coming forward, critics suggested that he was trying to get ahead of a story that was going to emerge anyway.

All agreed, though, that the decision came with consequences: “Career death,” The Washington Post declared it in 2022 , noting that the once-ubiquitous Mr. Spurlock had largely disappeared.

Clay Risen is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk. More about Clay Risen

Remy Tumin is a reporter for The Times covering breaking news and other topics. More about Remy Tumin

J.K. Rowling says in new book of essays that loved ones begged her to keep trans views private

J .K. Rowling has revealed in a new book of essays that her loved ones had tried to persuade her to keep her views on transgender women to herself.

The Harry Potter author has contributed to an essay collection, "The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht", and in an extract published in The Times said that “people around me, including some I love, were begging me not to speak.”

“So I watched from the sidelines as women with everything to lose rallied, in Scotland and across the UK, to defend their rights. My guilt that I wasn’t standing with them was with me daily, like a chronic pain.”

Rowling has caused repeated controversy with her stance on trans rights, having shared numerous statements condemned as transphobic stemming back to 2020. She has been met with strong backlash in recent years over her claims that trans women “are not women” and her statemennt that she would rather go to jail than refer to a trans person by their preferred pronouns.

In the extract from "The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht" – a title which refers to a slogan used by so-called ‘gender critical’ activists in Scotland - Rowling also hits out at the double standards of friends who have rushed to criticise her views on transgender rights. The author said she had been surprised by colleagues who had condemned her views in public, only for them to email her privately to remain friends.

“People who’d worked with me rushed to distance themselves from me or to add their public condemnation of my blasphemous views,” she wrote. “In truth, the condemnation of certain individuals was far less surprising to me than the fact that some of them then emailed me, or sent messages through third parties, to check that we were still friends.”

Rowling went on to add that “those appalled by my position often fail to grasp how truly despicable I find theirs. I’ve watched ‘no debate’ become the slogan of those who once posed as defenders of free speech. I’ve witnessed supposedly progressive men arguing that women don’t exist as an observable biological class and don’t deserve biology-based rights.”

The author did not name names.

However, Rowling has had public disagreements with those who worked with her on the Harry Potter movies in recent years.

Harry Potter stars Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint have all spoken out against her views and defended transgender women and men.

Earlier this month, Radcliffe told The Atlantic that Rowling’s views “make me really sad”, adding: “Because I do look at the person that I met, the times that we met, and the books that she wrote, and the world that she created, and all of that is to me so deeply empathic.”

Rowling previously said that she wouldn’t forgive the Harry Potter stars who have criticised her views.

“Celebs who cosied up to a movement intent on eroding women’s hard-won rights and who used their platforms to cheer on the transitioning of minors can save their apologies for traumatised detransitioners and vulnerable women reliant on single sex spaces,” she wrote on X/Twitter.

"The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht" is released today (Thursday 30 May) and is a collection of more than 30 essays and photographs from women in Scotland who claim to be on “the frontline of the battle for women’s rights”. It includes the views of women who are opposed to the Scottish government’s gender reform plans, who argue that the proposals infringe on women’s safety.

The Impact of Black Codes on Reconstruction: a Critical Examination for APUSH Students

This essay about the impact of Black Codes during Reconstruction explores the legal mechanisms used to enforce racial subjugation in the post-Civil War South. It examines how these laws restricted African Americans’ rights and freedoms, perpetuating systemic inequality. The essay also highlights the resistance from Radical Republicans and grassroots activists who fought for equality and justice. Ultimately, it underscores the enduring legacy of slavery and the continuous struggle for a more just and equitable society.

How it works

In the intricate dance of post-Civil War America, Reconstruction emerges as a pivotal chapter where the nation grappled with the aftermath of conflict and the promise of a new beginning. Central to this narrative are the Black Codes, insidious laws that emerged in the wake of emancipation, serving as a stark reminder of the entrenched forces of oppression and the complexities of forging a more equitable society. As students of APUSH embark on their academic journey, a critical exploration of the impact of Black Codes on Reconstruction offers a nuanced understanding of power dynamics, resistance movements, and the enduring quest for justice.

Like tendrils of the past reaching into the present, Black Codes manifested as legal instruments designed to maintain the status quo of racial subjugation in the South. Crafted by Southern legislatures seeking to assert control over the newly freed African American population, these laws imposed a labyrinth of restrictions on everything from labor rights to mobility, effectively curtailing the promise of freedom and perpetuating a system of de facto servitude. Vagrancy statutes, apprenticeship laws, and racial segregation ordinances served as weapons wielded by the proponents of white supremacy, enforcing a social hierarchy that relegated African Americans to the margins of society.

Yet, amidst the oppressive landscape, seeds of resistance were sown, taking root in the hearts and minds of those determined to challenge the prevailing order. From the halls of Congress to the cotton fields of the South, voices of dissent echoed, demanding equality, dignity, and the recognition of basic human rights. Radical Republicans, spurred by a vision of a more just society, waged a legislative battle against the tide of discrimination, enshrining principles of equality in the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment. Meanwhile, grassroots activists, aided by the Freedmen’s Bureau and Northern philanthropists, forged networks of support, establishing schools, churches, and mutual aid societies as bulwarks against the tide of oppression.

The impact of Black Codes reverberated far beyond the realm of legislation, casting a long shadow over the social and economic landscape of Reconstruction-era America. Economic coercion, fueled by the specter of destitution, forced many African Americans into exploitative labor contracts, perpetuating a cycle of poverty and dependency reminiscent of the antebellum era. Denied access to education, property ownership, and political participation, African Americans found themselves ensnared in a web of systemic inequality, their aspirations for freedom stymied by the weight of institutionalized racism.

Yet, for all the obstacles they faced, African Americans and their allies remained undaunted, their resilience serving as a beacon of hope in a world shrouded in darkness. Through acts of defiance, solidarity, and collective action, they challenged the status quo, inching ever closer to the realization of a more just and equitable society. The legacy of their struggle, though fraught with setbacks and sacrifices, endures as a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the transformative power of collective action.

In conclusion, the impact of Black Codes on Reconstruction serves as a poignant reminder of the enduring legacy of slavery and the formidable barriers to progress that persist in its wake. Through critical examination and thoughtful reflection, APUSH students are invited to engage with the complexities of history, interrogating the narratives of power and resistance that have shaped the course of American society. In the crucible of Reconstruction, they are challenged not only to understand the past but to confront its implications for the present and future, forging a path toward a more just and equitable world.

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• university of new orleans
• campus news
• in memoriam: philosophy professor frank schalow

CAMPUS NEWS: MAY 30, 2024

In memoriam, in memoriam: philosophy professor frank schalow.

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Frank Schalow, a University of New Orleans philosophy faculty member, died May 25, 2024.

Frank Schalow, a University of New Orleans philosophy faculty member for nearly three decades and an internationally renowned authority on German philosopher Martin Heidegger, died on May 25 at the age of 68.

Schalow started his career at UNO in 1995 as an adjunct faculty member. In 2001, he was promoted to assistant professor and became a full professor in 2010. He taught classes including Introduction to Philosophy, Social Ethics, Ethics, The Philosophy of Kant and The Philosophy of Heidegger.

Schalow was a prolific author and researcher. He wrote 12 books on Heidegger and was the longtime co-editor of “Heidegger Studies,” an international journal published in four languages. Considered one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century, Heidegger was best known for his philosophy of existentialism. Schalow’s other areas of research interest included ethics, medical ethics, phenomenology, and 19th and 20th century German thought.

“Dr. Schalow had the admiration of his students and the respect of his colleagues,” said Robert Stufflebeam, associate professor of philosophy. “He was the embodiment of the philosophy professor stereotype. He was brilliant, but quirky. He always wore a tie, even if it bore no stylistic relation to whatever shirt he was wearing. He always spoke thoughtfully and logically. He was never heard to raise his voice in anger. The philosophy program has suffered a great loss. Professor Schalow was one of a kind. He will be missed.”

In addition to the dozen books he authored on Heidegger, Schalow co-edited three books, wrote 16 chapters, and authored several dozen journal articles, review essays, critical discussions and book reviews, Stufflebeam said.

According to colleagues, Schalow’s commitment to his discipline was matched only by his devotion to the stray cats for which he cared for in his New Orleans neighborhood and his beloved New York Yankees.

Schalow earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Denver, and both a master’s and doctorate in philosophy from Tulane University.

Student Access and Success Drives UNO’s New Enrollment VP

Uno-delgado partnership to enhance transfer student success in biology.

UNO and Innsbruck Students Create ‘History Exchange,’ An Oral History Podcast

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27 Practicing New Historicism and Cultural Studies

For our New Historicism and cultural studies theoretical response, we will take a slightly different approach compared with previous chapters. Everyone will read an excerpt from The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald and review four film trailers and reviews below. You’ll then choose between two options to complete your theoretical response. Note that in both cases, your theoretical response will be slightly longer (750-1000 words) this week because you’ll need to integrate multiple sources.

Option One: New Historicism

Using the artifacts listed below, apply the techniques of New Historicism to explore how these texts exist and interact within their contexts. Here are the four required artifacts:

• Excerpt from  The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
• “Lament for Dark Peoples” by Langston Hughes (1926)
• The 1926 film trailer for The Great Gatsby  (below)
• The 1926 New York Times film review for The Great Gatsby  (note: you will need to use your free student account to access this article).

You may also want to do some brief research about the historical conditions of 1925-1926 in the United States. Focus on the artifacts as evidence of their historical contexts. Your response should be 750-1000 words and include a brief thesis statement that reflects your critical approach.

Here are some questions to consider as you write your response:

• What do we need to know about F. Scott Fitzgerald to understand The Great Gatsby as a cultural artifact? What do we need to know about Langston Hughes? And how does purely biographical criticism differ from a New Historicism approach?
• What are some of the main historical events that occurred in the period when the book, poem, and film were created? Do you see these historical events reflected in these three artifacts?
• How might this historical context shape the creation of these three cultural artifacts? How does the 1926 film review affect your understanding of this context?
• Do we see congruity in messaging around social norms in these three artifacts? What are those social norms? Are there any missing or excluded voices in these artifacts? If so, why?
• What other artifacts might you consider if you wanted to learn more or confirm your theories about the historical context for these three artifacts? For example, what kinds of advertisements would you expect to see in this issue of the New York Times ?
• How do we view these artifacts and their societal/cultural norms from our modern perspective? In other words, have our cultural/societal norms remained stable in the 60 years since these cultural artifacts were published? If not, what significant changes have occurred?

Option Two: Cultural Studies

Film and media studies are common cultural studies approaches. For this option, you’ll have more choice over your artifacts, and you’ll be considering the text and the film artifacts as examples of the cultures that produced them. You’ll need to use the following artifact:

Then choose any two film trailers and reviews from the 1949, 1974, and 2013 versions linked below.

In addition to considering the historical and cultural context of the novel, you should also do some brief historical research about the two film years that you choose. Focus on the artifacts as evidence of the culture that produced and received them, and consider how and why that reception has changed over time. Your response should be 750-1000 words and include a brief thesis statement that reflects your critical approach.

• What do we need to know about F. Scott Fitzgerald to understand The Great Gatsby as a cultural artifact? What did “popular culture” look like in the mid 1920s in the United States?
• What cultural norms do you see reflected in the two film adaptations you chose? How do the cultural norms when these movies were made compare with the cultural norms in the novel excerpt?
• How do the film reviews affect your understanding of this cultural context?
• How have social norms and the messaging around them changed in these three artifacts? What are those social norms? Are there any missing or excluded voices in these artifacts? If so, why?
• What other artifacts might you consider if you wanted to learn more or confirm your theories about societal and cultural norms in these three artifacts? For example, what kinds of advertisements would you expect to see in this issue of the New York Times ?
• How do we view these artifacts and their societal/cultural norms from our modern perspective? Have our views changed since these cultural artifacts were published? (This may be an especially interesting question if you choose the 2013 version).

Post your short essay (using either option one or option two) to the New Historicism/Cultural Studies Theoretical Response discussion board. Please include the option you have chosen in your post title. I have included the theoretical response assignment instructions at the end of this chapter.

Excerpt from “The Great Gatsby” (1925)

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby’s house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not invited—they went there. They got into automobiles which bore them out to Long Island, and somehow they ended up at Gatsby’s door. Once there they were introduced by somebody who knew Gatsby, and after that they conducted themselves according to the rules of behaviour associated with an amusement park. Sometimes they came and went without having met Gatsby at all, came for the party with a simplicity of heart that was its own ticket of admission. I had been actually invited. A chauffeur in a uniform of robin’s-egg blue crossed my lawn early that Saturday morning with a surprisingly formal note from his employer: the honour would be entirely Gatsby’s, it said, if I would attend his “little party” that night. He had seen me several times, and had intended to call on me long before, but a peculiar combination of circumstances had prevented it—signed Jay Gatsby, in a majestic hand. Dressed up in white flannels I went over to his lawn a little after seven, and wandered around rather ill at ease among swirls and eddies of people I didn’t know—though here and there was a face I had noticed on the commuting train. I was immediately struck by the number of young Englishmen dotted about; all well dressed, all looking a little hungry, and all talking in low, earnest voices to solid and prosperous Americans. I was sure that they were selling something: bonds or insurance or automobiles. They were at least agonizingly aware of the easy money in the vicinity and convinced that it was theirs for a few words in the right key. As soon as I arrived I made an attempt to find my host, but the two or three people of whom I asked his whereabouts stared at me in such an amazed way, and denied so vehemently any knowledge of his movements, that I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table—the only place in the garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and alone. I was on my way to get roaring drunk from sheer embarrassment when Jordan Baker came out of the house and stood at the head of the marble steps, leaning a little backward and looking with contemptuous interest down into the garden. Welcome or not, I found it necessary to attach myself to someone before I should begin to address cordial remarks to the passersby. “Hello!” I roared, advancing toward her. My voice seemed unnaturally loud across the garden. “I thought you might be here,” she responded absently as I came up. “I remembered you lived next door to—” She held my hand impersonally, as a promise that she’d take care of me in a minute, and gave ear to two girls in twin yellow dresses, who stopped at the foot of the steps. “Hello!” they cried together. “Sorry you didn’t win.” That was for the golf tournament. She had lost in the finals the week before. “You don’t know who we are,” said one of the girls in yellow, “but we met you here about a month ago.” “You’ve dyed your hair since then,” remarked Jordan, and I started, but the girls had moved casually on and her remark was addressed to the premature moon, produced like the supper, no doubt, out of a caterer’s basket. With Jordan’s slender golden arm resting in mine, we descended the steps and sauntered about the garden. A tray of cocktails floated at us through the twilight, and we sat down at a table with the two girls in yellow and three men, each one introduced to us as Mr. Mumble. “Do you come to these parties often?” inquired Jordan of the girl beside her. “The last one was the one I met you at,” answered the girl, in an alert confident voice. She turned to her companion: “Wasn’t it for you, Lucille?” It was for Lucille, too. “I like to come,” Lucille said. “I never care what I do, so I always have a good time. When I was here last I tore my gown on a chair, and he asked me my name and address—inside of a week I got a package from Croirier’s with a new evening gown in it.” “Did you keep it?” asked Jordan. “Sure I did. I was going to wear it tonight, but it was too big in the bust and had to be altered. It was gas blue with lavender beads. Two hundred and sixty-five dollars.” “There’s something funny about a fellow that’ll do a thing like that,” said the other girl eagerly. “He doesn’t want any trouble with  any body.” “Who doesn’t?” I inquired. “Gatsby. Somebody told me—” The two girls and Jordan leaned together confidentially. “Somebody told me they thought he killed a man once.” A thrill passed over all of us. The three Mr. Mumbles bent forward and listened eagerly. “I don’t think it’s so much  that ,” argued Lucille sceptically; “It’s more that he was a German spy during the war.” One of the men nodded in confirmation. “I heard that from a man who knew all about him, grew up with him in Germany,” he assured us positively. “Oh, no,” said the first girl, “it couldn’t be that, because he was in the American army during the war.” As our credulity switched back to her she leaned forward with enthusiasm. “You look at him sometimes when he thinks nobody’s looking at him. I’ll bet he killed a man.” She narrowed her eyes and shivered. Lucille shivered. We all turned and looked around for Gatsby. It was testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired that there were whispers about him from those who had found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this world. The first supper—there would be another one after midnight—was now being served, and Jordan invited me to join her own party, who were spread around a table on the other side of the garden. There were three married couples and Jordan’s escort, a persistent undergraduate given to violent innuendo, and obviously under the impression that sooner or later Jordan was going to yield him up her person to a greater or lesser degree. Instead of rambling, this party had preserved a dignified homogeneity, and assumed to itself the function of representing the staid nobility of the countryside—East Egg condescending to West Egg and carefully on guard against its spectroscopic gaiety. “Let’s get out,” whispered Jordan, after a somehow wasteful and inappropriate half-hour; “this is much too polite for me.” We got up, and she explained that we were going to find the host: I had never met him, she said, and it was making me uneasy. The undergraduate nodded in a cynical, melancholy way. The bar, where we glanced first, was crowded, but Gatsby was not there. She couldn’t find him from the top of the steps, and he wasn’t on the veranda. On a chance we tried an important-looking door, and walked into a high Gothic library, panelled with carved English oak, and probably transported complete from some ruin overseas. A stout, middle-aged man, with enormous owl-eyed spectacles, was sitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, staring with unsteady concentration at the shelves of books. As we entered he wheeled excitedly around and examined Jordan from head to foot. “What do you think?” he demanded impetuously. “About what?” He waved his hand toward the bookshelves. “About that. As a matter of fact you needn’t bother to ascertain. I ascertained. They’re real.” “The books?” He nodded. “Absolutely real—have pages and everything. I thought they’d be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact, they’re absolutely real. Pages and—Here! Lemme show you.” Taking our scepticism for granted, he rushed to the bookcases and returned with Volume One of the  Stoddard Lectures . “See!” he cried triumphantly. “It’s a bona-fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella’s a regular Belasco. It’s a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too—didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?” He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf, muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable to collapse. “Who brought you?” he demanded. “Or did you just come? I was brought. Most people were brought.” Jordan looked at him alertly, cheerfully, without answering. “I was brought by a woman named Roosevelt,” he continued. “Mrs. Claud Roosevelt. Do you know her? I met her somewhere last night. I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.” “Has it?” “A little bit, I think. I can’t tell yet. I’ve only been here an hour. Did I tell you about the books? They’re real. They’re—” “You told us.” We shook hands with him gravely and went back outdoors. There was dancing now on the canvas in the garden; old men pushing young girls backward in eternal graceless circles, superior couples holding each other tortuously, fashionably, and keeping in the corners—and a great number of single girls dancing individually or relieving the orchestra for a moment of the burden of the banjo or the traps. By midnight the hilarity had increased. A celebrated tenor had sung in Italian, and a notorious contralto had sung in jazz, and between the numbers people were doing “stunts” all over the garden, while happy, vacuous bursts of laughter rose toward the summer sky. A pair of stage twins, who turned out to be the girls in yellow, did a baby act in costume, and champagne was served in glasses bigger than finger-bowls. The moon had risen higher, and floating in the Sound was a triangle of silver scales, trembling a little to the stiff, tinny drip of the banjoes on the lawn. I was still with Jordan Baker. We were sitting at a table with a man of about my age and a rowdy little girl, who gave way upon the slightest provocation to uncontrollable laughter. I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two finger-bowls of champagne, and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental, and profound. At a lull in the entertainment the man looked at me and smiled. “Your face is familiar,” he said politely. “Weren’t you in the First Division during the war?” “Why yes. I was in the Twenty-eighth Infantry.” “I was in the Sixteenth until June nineteen-eighteen. I knew I’d seen you somewhere before.” We talked for a moment about some wet, grey little villages in France. Evidently he lived in this vicinity, for he told me that he had just bought a hydroplane, and was going to try it out in the morning. “Want to go with me, old sport? Just near the shore along the Sound.” “What time?” “Any time that suits you best.” It was on the tip of my tongue to ask his name when Jordan looked around and smiled. “Having a gay time now?” she inquired. “Much better.” I turned again to my new acquaintance. “This is an unusual party for me. I haven’t even seen the host. I live over there—” I waved my hand at the invisible hedge in the distance, “and this man Gatsby sent over his chauffeur with an invitation.” For a moment he looked at me as if he failed to understand. “I’m Gatsby,” he said suddenly. “What!” I exclaimed. “Oh, I beg your pardon.” “I thought you knew, old sport. I’m afraid I’m not a very good host.” He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on  you  with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished—and I was looking at an elegant young roughneck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he introduced himself I’d got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care. Almost at the moment when Mr. Gatsby identified himself a butler hurried toward him with the information that Chicago was calling him on the wire. He excused himself with a small bow that included each of us in turn. “If you want anything just ask for it, old sport,” he urged me. “Excuse me. I will rejoin you later.” When he was gone I turned immediately to Jordan—constrained to assure her of my surprise. I had expected that Mr. Gatsby would be a florid and corpulent person in his middle years. “Who is he?” I demanded. “Do you know?” “He’s just a man named Gatsby.” “Where is he from, I mean? And what does he do?” “Now  you ’re started on the subject,” she answered with a wan smile. “Well, he told me once he was an Oxford man.” A dim background started to take shape behind him, but at her next remark it faded away. “However, I don’t believe it.” “Why not?” “I don’t know,” she insisted, “I just don’t think he went there.” Something in her tone reminded me of the other girl’s “I think he killed a man,” and had the effect of stimulating my curiosity. I would have accepted without question the information that Gatsby sprang from the swamps of Louisiana or from the lower East Side of New York. That was comprehensible. But young men didn’t—at least in my provincial inexperience I believed they didn’t—drift coolly out of nowhere and buy a palace on Long Island Sound. “Anyhow, he gives large parties,” said Jordan, changing the subject with an urban distaste for the concrete. “And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.” There was the boom of a bass drum, and the voice of the orchestra leader rang out suddenly above the echolalia of the garden. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he cried. “At the request of Mr. Gatsby we are going to play for you Mr. Vladmir Tostoff’s latest work, which attracted so much attention at Carnegie Hall last May. If you read the papers you know there was a big sensation.” He smiled with jovial condescension, and added: “Some sensation!” Whereupon everybody laughed. “The piece is known,” he concluded lustily, “as ‘Vladmir Tostoff’s Jazz History of the World!’ ” The nature of Mr. Tostoff’s composition eluded me, because just as it began my eyes fell on Gatsby, standing alone on the marble steps and looking from one group to another with approving eyes. His tanned skin was drawn attractively tight on his face and his short hair looked as though it were trimmed every day. I could see nothing sinister about him. I wondered if the fact that he was not drinking helped to set him off from his guests, for it seemed to me that he grew more correct as the fraternal hilarity increased. When the “Jazz History of the World” was over, girls were putting their heads on men’s shoulders in a puppyish, convivial way, girls were swooning backward playfully into men’s arms, even into groups, knowing that someone would arrest their falls—but no one swooned backward on Gatsby, and no French bob touched Gatsby’s shoulder, and no singing quartets were formed with Gatsby’s head for one link. “I beg your pardon.” Gatsby’s butler was suddenly standing beside us. “Miss Baker?” he inquired. “I beg your pardon, but Mr. Gatsby would like to speak to you alone.” “With me?” she exclaimed in surprise. “Yes, madame.” She got up slowly, raising her eyebrows at me in astonishment, and followed the butler toward the house. I noticed that she wore her evening-dress, all her dresses, like sports clothes—there was a jauntiness about her movements as if she had first learned to walk upon golf courses on clean, crisp mornings. I was alone and it was almost two. For some time confused and intriguing sounds had issued from a long, many-windowed room which overhung the terrace. Eluding Jordan’s undergraduate, who was now engaged in an obstetrical conversation with two chorus girls, and who implored me to join him, I went inside. The large room was full of people. One of the girls in yellow was playing the piano, and beside her stood a tall, red-haired young lady from a famous chorus, engaged in song. She had drunk a quantity of champagne, and during the course of her song she had decided, ineptly, that everything was very, very sad—she was not only singing, she was weeping too. Whenever there was a pause in the song she filled it with gasping, broken sobs, and then took up the lyric again in a quavering soprano. The tears coursed down her cheeks—not freely, however, for when they came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they assumed an inky colour, and pursued the rest of their way in slow black rivulets. A humorous suggestion was made that she sing the notes on her face, whereupon she threw up her hands, sank into a chair, and went off into a deep vinous sleep. “She had a fight with a man who says he’s her husband,” explained a girl at my elbow. I looked around. Most of the remaining women were now having fights with men said to be their husbands. Even Jordan’s party, the quartet from East Egg, were rent asunder by dissension. One of the men was talking with curious intensity to a young actress, and his wife, after attempting to laugh at the situation in a dignified and indifferent way, broke down entirely and resorted to flank attacks—at intervals she appeared suddenly at his side like an angry diamond, and hissed: “You promised!” into his ear. The reluctance to go home was not confined to wayward men. The hall was at present occupied by two deplorably sober men and their highly indignant wives. The wives were sympathizing with each other in slightly raised voices. “Whenever he sees I’m having a good time he wants to go home.” “Never heard anything so selfish in my life.” “We’re always the first ones to leave.” “So are we.” “Well, we’re almost the last tonight,” said one of the men sheepishly. “The orchestra left half an hour ago.” In spite of the wives’ agreement that such malevolence was beyond credibility, the dispute ended in a short struggle, and both wives were lifted, kicking, into the night. As I waited for my hat in the hall the door of the library opened and Jordan Baker and Gatsby came out together. He was saying some last word to her, but the eagerness in his manner tightened abruptly into formality as several people approached him to say goodbye. Jordan’s party were calling impatiently to her from the porch, but she lingered for a moment to shake hands. “I’ve just heard the most amazing thing,” she whispered. “How long were we in there?” “Why, about an hour.” “It was… simply amazing,” she repeated abstractedly. “But I swore I wouldn’t tell it and here I am tantalizing you.” She yawned gracefully in my face. “Please come and see me… Phone book… Under the name of Mrs. Sigourney Howard… My aunt…” She was hurrying off as she talked—her brown hand waved a jaunty salute as she melted into her party at the door. Rather ashamed that on my first appearance I had stayed so late, I joined the last of Gatsby’s guests, who were clustered around him. I wanted to explain that I’d hunted for him early in the evening and to apologize for not having known him in the garden. “Don’t mention it,” he enjoined me eagerly. “Don’t give it another thought, old sport.” The familiar expression held no more familiarity than the hand which reassuringly brushed my shoulder. “And don’t forget we’re going up in the hydroplane tomorrow morning, at nine o’clock.” Then the butler, behind his shoulder: “Philadelphia wants you on the phone, sir.” “All right, in a minute. Tell them I’ll be right there… Good night.” “Good night.” “Good night.” He smiled—and suddenly there seemed to be a pleasant significance in having been among the last to go, as if he had desired it all the time. “Good night, old sport… Good night.”

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. “Excerpt from Chapter Three” The Great Gatsby, 1925. https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/64317/pg64317-images.html Public Domain.

Film Trailers and New York Times Reviews

After reading the excerpt from  The Great Gatsby , watch these four film trailers. If you choose to take a New Historicism approach, you should use the 1926 version. For a cultural studies approach, please choose two trailers/reviews from the 1949, 1974, and 2013 versions.

1926 Version

Review: Hall, Mordaunt. “Gold and Cocktails.” The New York Times. November 22, 1926. https://www.nytimes.com/1926/11/22/archives/gold-and-cocktails.html

1949 Version

Review: Crowther, Bosley. “The Screen in Review: ‘The Great Gatsby,’ Based on the Novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Opens at the Paramount.”  The New York Times.  https://www.nytimes.com/1949/07/14/archives/the-screen-in-review-the-great-gatsby-based-on-novel-of-f-scott.htm l

1974 Version

Review: Canby, Vincent. “A Lavish ‘Gatsby’ Loses the Book’s Spirit.”  The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1974/03/28/archives/a-lavish-gatsby-loses-book-s-spirit.html%20%0d2013

2013 Version

Review: Scott, A.O. “Shimmying Off the Literary Mantle.”  The New York Times.  https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/10/movies/the-great-gatsby-interpreted-by-baz-luhrmann.html

Theoretical Response Assignment Instructions

Instructions.

• 15 points: theoretical response
• 10 points: online discussion (5 points per response) OR class attendance.

Critical Worlds Copyright © 2024 by Liza Long is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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