Answer to Question #221441 in English for PHESH

Question

Discuss the three fallacies of New Criticism in relation to the New Critics’ ideas on the nature of the aesthetic object and its interpretation.

Answer 1

It was frequently alleged that the New Criticism treated literary texts as autonomous and divorced from historical context, and that its practitioners were uninterested in the human meaning, the social function and effect of literature.

Terence Hawkes writes that the fundamental close reading technique is based on the assumption that the subject and the object of study—the reader and the text—are stable and independent forms rather than products of the unconscious process of signification. An assumption which he identifies as the "ideology of liberal humanism, which is attributed to the New Critics who are accused of attempting to disguise the interests at work in their critical processes. For Hawkes, ideally, a critic ought to be considered to create the finished work by his reading of it, and not to remain simply an inert consumer of a ready-made product.

Another objection against New Criticism is that it misguidedly tries to turn literary criticism into an objective science or at least aims at bringing literary study to a condition rivaling that of science. One example of this is Ransom's essay Criticism, Inc, in which he advocated that "criticism must become more scientific, or precise and systematic. René Wellek, however, argued against this by noting that a number of the New Critics outlined their theoretical aesthetics in contrast to the objectivity of the sciences.