The Traditional Criticism

A Research about The Traditional and The New Criticism
What is Literary Criticism?
Literary criticism or literary analysis can be defined as,
“An informed analysis and evaluation of a piece of literature”.
Or
A written study, evaluation and interpretation of a work of literature”. * The study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature * A theory founded upon the term “critique” (an analysis of written or oral discourse) * Literary Criticism is usually in the form of a critical essay (though book reviews may sometimes be considered literary criticism)
The literary criticism is a concept, formed on the basis of critical analysis and primarily estimates the value and merit of literary works for the presence or quality of certain parameters of literary characteristics.
Literary Analysis on the Basis of Literary Theory
The literary theory is a boarder concept incorporating various strict senses and merits for the systematic study of the nature of literature and provides a complete set of methods for analyzing literature. * There are several "schools" of criticism which I will begin to examine
Traditional Criticism
The traditional criticism approach examines you examine how the author’s life, his/her biographical information, contemporary times and effect of his life circumstances on his inspiration and their reflection in his works.It Connects an author’s life events with the ideas presented in a text * Believes that authors use their own life experiences to craft texts—even if it is done unintentionally
The excellence of the critical essay comes with the DEPTH of the connections
The biographical literary critic believes that a work can best be understood by investigating the life of the person who wrote it. There is a difference between the biography of a person and biographical criticism, though. The biography of a person is the history of that person, information that stands on its own merit. Biographical criticism is not concerned with the history of the person for any other reason than to add insight into the work that the person produced.
There are a few problems dealing with biographical criticism that the biographical critic must take into account. The biggest problem is that writers tend to embellish on the facts of their own lives think about it they are writers after all! Perhaps a successful author wants to conceal certain undesirable facts of his or her history he or she may make up things that never happened in real life, or may leave out important event that did happen. Say a writer grew up in an abusive family and wants to use his or her new success to help overcome that. He or she certainly isn't going to go around advertising that information. As a result, a writer may tell tall tales of growing up on yachts and being guest of honor at a prestigious neighbor's dinner party, when the truth is that the person didn't even own a Jon boat and the only dinner party he attended was the one where he was the waiter.
Another danger for the biographical literary critic is the potential for the biography of the writer to overshadow his or her work. Biographical critics should be very cautious of this fact. Biographical criticism is designed to enhance the meaning of a piece of work, not to over shadow it.
None-the-less, knowing certain things about a writer can add a completely different spin to what they have written. This is what the biographical critic is aiming for. Things that would have otherwise been skipped right over may jump off the page screaming when viewed from a new fact about the writer. This is especially important in poetry, because it underscores subtleties, important nuances of the poem.
Biographical critics recognize that writers draw from personal experience when developing their poems and stories, and these personal experiences give the piece an undertone that is significant to the work. Kennedy points out that knowing a person committed suicide at 41 makes us pay more attention to key elements of a poem that was written by that author.
This technique is commonly used in in general surveys of English literature. It includes a general analysis of the writers as opposed to a detailed analysis of their individual works.
Bio Critics asks these questions
How does the author’s early family life influence the ideas presented in the author’s tales? * How does the author’s relationship with her husband impact the presentation of men in the author’s works? * How does the author use first hand knowledge to craft the setting of the novel? * Write your own question from a bio critic’s standpoint.
New Criticism
The new criticism approach is mostly used in poetry analysis and evaluates elements like diction, imagery, stanza structure, verse form, meanings, particularly and complexities of meaning.
This form of critical analysis refrains from analyzing the biographical and historical context of a poem.
The New Critics asks these questions: * How does the author’s use of metaphor affect the meaning of this text? * Structuralist Critics ask these questions: * How should the text be classified in terms of its genre? In other words, what patterns exist within the text that make it a part of other works like it? * Which words in the text contribute to the tone of the text? * How is theme related to the setting used? * Write your own question from a structuralist critic’s standpoint. * Seeking to bring new respect, new theories and philosophies to critical literary scholarship, New Criticism presented critics with a vernacular to isolate and discuss a unified structure of aesthetic quality and apply it to individual works of art. New Criticism is a process of interpretation, a method of reading a text, as much as it is a theoretical endeavor, though. New Critics look for patterns of symbols and metaphors that point toward an underlying sense of unity in form, rhythm, or structure; they expect a work of literature to hang together, to express stability, to cohere. “Poetry... depends upon the set of relationships, the structure, which we call the poem” (Penn Warren 990). The most difficult task of the New Critic is discovering and describing the thematic oppositions within a text which it attempts to transcend or resolve. Irony and ambiguity provide most potent forms of this contextual pressure. The most successful literature, therefore, struggles against the resistances of its own materials, its own structure, attempting to win through “to clarity and passion” (Brooks 805).