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.
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. These goals were articulated in Ransom's "Criticism, Inc." and Allen Tate's "Miss Emily and the Bibliographers."
Close reading (or explication de texte) was a staple of French literary studies, but in the United States, aesthetic concerns, and the study of modern poets was the province of non-academic essayists and book reviewers rather than serious scholars. But the New Criticism changed this. Though their interest in textual study initially met with resistance from older scholars, the methods of the New Critics rapidly predominated in American universities until challenged by Feminism and structuralism in the 1970s. Other schools of critical theory, including, post-structuralism, and deconstructionist theory, the New Historicism, and Receptions studies followed.
New Historicism is a school of literary theory which first developed in the 1980s, primarily through the work of the critic and Harvard English Professor Stephen Greenblatt, and gained widespread influence in the 1990s.
- that every human action is actually the effect of a network of material practices;
- that every act of unmasking, critique and opposition uses the tools it condemns and risks falling prey to the practice it exposes;
- that literary and non-literary "texts" are equally valuable;
- that no discourse (imaginative, scientific, or archival) gives access to unchanging truths, nor expresses unalterable human nature;
- that a critical method and a language adequate to describe culture under capitalism participate in the economy they describe.
Camille Paglia likewise cites "the New Historicism coming out of Berkeley" as an "issue where the PC academy thinks it's going to reform the old bad path, I have been there before they have been, and I'm there to punish and expose and to say what they are doing...a piece of crap."[5] Elsewhere, Paglia has suggested that New Historicism is "a refuge for English majors without critical talent or broad learning in history or political science. [...] To practice it, you must apparently lack all historical sense."[6]
Focalization is a term coined by the French narrative theorist Gerard Genette. It refers to the perspective through which a narrative is presented. For example, a narrative where all information presented reflects the subjective perception of a certain character is said to be internally focalized. An omniscient narrator corresponds to zero focalization. External focalization - camera eye. A novel in which no simple rules restrict the transition between different focalizations could be said to be unfocalized, but specific relationships between basic types of focalization constitute more complex focalization strategies; for example, a novel could provide external focalization alternating with internal focalizations through three different characters, where the second character is never focalized except after the first, and three other characters are never focalized at all.
The specific domain of literary theory which deals with focalization is narratology, and it concerns not only distinctions between subjective and objective focalizations but various gradations between them, such as free indirect discourse, style indirect libre, or quasi-direct discourse. Narratologists tend to have a difficult time agreeing on the exact definitions of categories in their field; hence its dynamic nature.
Close Reading is a central focus of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). It requires students to get truly involved with the text they are reading. The purpose is to teach them to notice features and language used by the author.
Close reading site sample"
http://writingcenter.fas.harvard.edu/pages/how-do-close-reading
"3. Ask questions about the patterns you've noticed—especially how and why.
To answer some of our own questions, we have to look back at the text and see what else is going on. For instance, when Eiseley touches the web with his pencil point—an event "for which no precedent existed"—the spider, naturally, can make no sense of the pencil phenomenon: "Spider was circumscribed by spider ideas." Of course, spiders don't have ideas, but we do. And if we start seeing this passage in human terms, seeing the spider's situation in "her universe" as analogous to our situation in our universe (which we think of as the universe), then we may decide that Eiseley is suggesting that our universe (the universe) is also finite, that our ideas are circumscribed, and that beyond the limits of our universe there might be phenomena as fully beyond our ken as Eiseley himself—that "vast impossible shadow"—was beyond the understanding of the spider.
But why vast and impossible, why a shadow? Does Eiseley mean God, extra-terrestrials? Or something else, something we cannot name or even imagine? Is this the lesson? Now we see that the sense of tale telling or myth at the start of the passage, plus this reference to something vast and unseen, weighs against a simple E.T. sort of interpretation. And though the spider can't explain, or even apprehend, Eiseley's pencil point, that pencil point is explainable—rational after all. So maybe not God. We need more evidence, so we go back to the text—the whole essay now, not just this one passage—and look for additional clues. And as we proceed in this way, paying close attention to the evidence, asking questions, formulating interpretations, we engage in a process that is central to essay writing and to the whole academic enterprise: in other words, we reason toward our own ideas."
-Copyright 1998, Patricia Kain, for the Writing Center at Harvard Universit
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