New Criticism

New criticism: According to new criticism, when you analyse a text, the place where you will find its meaning is in the text itself, not in the author’s mind and world, and certainly not the reader’s mind and world. It relates to form and language. The meaning of a text can be found in reading it really, really carefully. They don’t care what the author intended the text to mean, and they don’t care what it means to you; rather, they care only about what the text itself says. And they are looking specifically for things that are in conflict, or in tension, or in opposition in the text, and the ways in which that tension is resolved and unified in the text. New critics think about the text as a whole, and how these tensions are played out and then resolved in a big-picture way. They then pick an important part of that text to look at really closely to find specific examples of that unity-of-tension in the little details. If you want to read a text like a new critic, try to find things that are in contrast. Then try to find how those things are somehow held together in such a way that the text makes sense as a whole. Finally, try to find specific examples where this plays out somewhere in the text.