Author Archives
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Saussurean Structuralism
Saussure introduced Structuralism in Linguistics, marking a revolutionary break in the study of language, which had till then been historical and philological. In his Course in General Linguistics (1916), Saussure saw language as a system of signs constructed by convention…. Read More ›
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Structuralism
The advent of critical theory in the post-war period, which comprised various complex disciplines like linguistics, literary criticism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, Structuralism, Postcolonialism etc., proved hostile to the liberal consensus which reigned the realm of criticism between the 1930s and `50s. Among… Read More ›
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New Criticism’s Relation to Modernism
New Criticism and Modernism emerged out of a world that was perceived as fragmented, with the Enlightenment ideals of rationality, progress and justice discredited; the artist alienated from the social and political world, and art and literature marginalised. The vast… Read More ›
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Chicago School (Neo-Aristotelians)
The Chicago School of critics or the Neo-Aristotelians included professors of the departments of Humanities, University of Chicago, who were engaged in bringing about a radical transformation in an attempt to revive Humanities and make them institutionally more competitive with… Read More ›
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Connotation and Denotation
Connotation and Denotation are crucial concepts in Semiotics, Structuralism, Marxism, Cultural Studies and in the entire realm of literary and cultural theory. Denotation refers to the primary signification or reference – the definitional, literal, obvious meaning of a sign. In… Read More ›
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Hillis Miller’s Concept of Critic as Host
The prominent Yale critic, J. Hillis Miller’s The Critic as host could be viewed as a reply to M.H. Abrams The Deconstructive Angel, which he presented at a session of the Modern Language-Association in December 1976, criticizing deconstruction and the methods… Read More ›
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IA Richards’ Concept of the Two Uses of Language
IA Richards, the New Critic, who, since Coleridge, formulated a systematic and complete theory of poetry, discusses in Principles of Literary Criticism the theory of language and the two uses of language the scientific and the emotive. David Daiches says,… Read More ›
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William Empson’s Concept of Ambiguity
Empson, a student of IA Richards, in (1930) promulgates a radically new approach to the language of poetry – to the multiple semantic possibilities of individual words, and to the frequent openness of English syntax to more than one construction…. Read More ›
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IA Richards’ Concept of Four Kinds of Meaning
IA Richards’ concept of four kinds of meaning has played a very significant role in New Criticism and modern tensional poetics. Pointing to the difficulty of all reading and of arriving at a universal meaning, Richards, in his Practical Criticism… Read More ›
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Roman Jakobson’s Concepts of Metaphor and Metonymy
In his 1956 essay, Two Aspects of Language and-Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances, Jakobson proposes that language has a bipolar structure, oscillating between the poles of metaphor and metonymy, and that any discourse is developed along the semantic lines of… Read More ›
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Cleanth Brooks’ Concept of Language of Paradox
Cleanth Brooks’ Concept of Language of Paradox
Language of Paradox
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FR Leavis’ Concept of Great Tradition
FR Leavis’ The Great Tradition (1948), an uncompromising critical and polemical survey of English fiction, controversially begins thus: “The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad!” He regards these writers as the best because… Read More ›
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Moral formalism: F. R. Leavis
F. R. Leavis became the major single target for the new critical theory of the 1970s. Both Raymond Williams in Politics and Letters (1979) and Terry Eagleton in Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983) bear witness to his enormous, ubiquitous influence in English Studies from the 1930s… Read More ›
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The American New Critics
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… Read More ›
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Roman Jakobson’s Contribution to Russian Formalism
The work of Roman Jakobson occupies a central place in the development of Formalism and Structuralism. A linguist from Moscow, Jakobson co-founded the Moscow Linguistic Circle in 1915, and along with Viktor Shklovsky and Boris Eichenbaum, he was involved in… Read More ›
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Defamiliarization
The Russian Formalists’ concept of “Defamiliarization”, proposed by Viktor Shklovsky in his Art as Technique, refers to the literary device whereby language is used in such a way that ordinary and familiar objects are made to look different. It is… Read More ›
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Affective Fallacy
An important concept in New Criticism, coined by Wimsatt and Beardsley in an essay in The Verbal Icon, Affective Fallacy refers to the supposed error of judging or evaluating a text on the basis of its emotional effects on a… Read More ›
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Close Reading: A Brief Note
A technique advocated by the New Critics in interpreting a literary work, Close Reading derived from (I A Richards’s Practical Criticism (1929) and William Empson’s The Seven Types of Ambiguity(1930). Endorsing the concept of “autotelic text”, that a text is… Read More ›
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Autotelic Text: A Brief Note
The New Critical notion of the autotelic text as self-contained and independent of the author, genre or historical context, was associated with Arnold’s insistence on objectivity and Eliot’s on impersonality. Such a text that contains meaning within itself is humanist… Read More ›
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