New Critical Formalism(American New Criticism)(American New Criticism)

Emerged in the 1920s/30s in England with the humanist critics I.A. Richards, F.R. Leavis, and T.S. Eliot and in America with the “New Critics” Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren and John Crowe Ransom

Marked the professionalization of American literary studies in the form of the “New Criticism”

Privileged poetry as a repository of organic unity and social harmony, counterpoised to the effects of industrialization and commercialization.

New Critics:

Considered poetry to resist commodification by the nature of its specifically poetic operations.

Defined poetry by its FORMAL STRUCTURE:

A poem creates harmony out of opposites and tension: a formal structure in which complexity and incoherence can be arranged and made visible.

This harmony is not stable, but rather a fusion of paradoxes that can only be achieved by the creative imagination.

New Critics Warned against affective and intentional fallacies, as well as the “heresy of paraphrase” (reducing a poem to a thematic statement).

Structuralism

For Structuralists, meaning derives from:meaning derives from:

Timeless, universal structures that form stable and self-contained systems of binary oppositions.

Signifiers that carry meaning only in relation to one another within a given system.

An arbitrary relationship between the signifier and the signified.

• Idealist (Platonic): God is the origin, center and guarantor of meaning.

• Humanist: The self is the source of meaning, which is expressed intentionally through language.

• Structuralist: Structure is at the center of a signifying system, is an impersonal force.

• All narratives are variations on universal patterns.

• Structure originates and produces meaning, which is therefore to be understood as the ultimate coherence of the structure itself.

The “Centers” of Meaning

Claude Lévi-StraussStructural Anthropology (1958)

(1958)Following Saussure (as well as Slavic linguist Roman Jakobson), Lévi-Strauss sought to systematize a semiology of culture.

Recast anthropology as a cultural model for understanding how the human mind functions universally.

Examined tribal cultures, in particular the the cultural value of totems (empowered representations of the non-human world) and taboos (prohibitions) as illuminative of the basic structural units of human binary thought.

Tribal communities apply substitutions (metaphors) and combinations (metonyms) to think about/make sense of the non-human in “code-

chains” or “sign-series”:

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Kinship

Society

Human Culture

Gods

Non-human nature

Vegetable | Animal

Structurally speaking, all linguistic representation can be understood as “Utterance,” that is, as manifestations of a system that lends order to the radical heterogeneity of language (langue vs. parole).

Structure is always recoverable because all representation enacts and reproduces the basic assumptions of a culture.

The Oedipus Myth

Lacan’s Reworking of the Freudian Psyche

Freud

EgoSon/Daug

hter

IdMother

SuperegoFather

Lacan

Real Imaginary

Symbolic

The Orders of Psychic Phenomena

• The Real: an undifferentiated ontological absolute (being in itself); outside of language, resistant to symbolization, inaccessible to the conscious mind, impossible to attain or even imagine. [The Referent]

• The Imaginary: “the little other”: realm of image and imagination, illusory wholeness, synthesis. [The Signified]

• Like Freud’s dream, the “Imaginary is only decipherable if rendered into symbols”

• The Symbolic: The “Big Other”

• The name-of-the-father (nom-de-Père)

• The phallus/phallic power; the law

• LANGUAGE: [The Signifier]

The Mirror Stage

• Lacan’s 1936 theory of the structure of the subject.

• Explores the implications of the statement that the “unconscious is structured like a language,” i.e. that it is split in the manner described by Saussure.

• Describes the formation of the Ego (or “the subject”) as a relation to the specular image of the body initiated by the entry into language (i.e. into the Symbolic order).

In the mirror phase, the infant sees its body as a whole and is thus permanently caught and captivated by his own image, which cannot be reconciled with the fragmentary nature of how the Real is experienced, nor how subjectivity is expressed through language.

The subject’s “recognition” of holistic being and joy at the anticipation of bodily mastery and integration is thus a “misrecognition” (méconnaissance). The subject becomes permanently alienated from himself and seeks to heal this split through language, which can only ceaselessly rearticulate this split.