New Criticism is based on the notion that a poem has an
inherent organic unity and can be read independent of context, as in I. A. Richards'
experiments in practical criticism. Meaning is made in poetry, according to new critics,
by the ways in which the linguistic texture of the poetic object interacts with the
generic functioning of the poetic medium. The poet, to a great degree, acts as a conduit
for the tradition of poetry to the present age in a process that is almost impersonal,
as T. S. Eliot pointed out in his seminal essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent,"
that acted to a great degree as a manifesto for the New Critical movement. The intention
of the author has no bearing on the interpretation of the poem, according to Wimsatt and
Beardsley's important New Critical essay, "The Intentional Fallacy." Wimsatt and
Beardsley also criticise the "affective fallacy," which interprets poems by their effect
on the reader.
What Wimsatt and Beardsley term the
"affective fallacy" is actually the centre of reader response criticism, which centres
the meaning of the poem on the way the reader responds to it. There are several
different strands of reader response, a European one, emphasizing a cultural horizon of
expectations, pioneered by Hans-Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser, one involving
interpretive communities as constructed by intellectual disciplines, associated with
Stanley Fish, and a popular psychological approach emphasizing student reading
practices.
Emasculation is a topic discussed in gender
theory, a third school of literary criticism unrelated to the other
two.
Affective
fallacy link:
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