Practical Criticism and New Criticism: Principles & Fallacies
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Features of English Practical Criticism
The origins were a desire to rescue literary studies from historicism and contextualism, and proponents wanted to turn literary study into a scientific method — to give seriousness and a true methodology to the analysis of literature. Richards thought that the only way to do that was to restrict the study to the text alone.
Richards gave his students sheets of paper on which literary fragments had been printed: short poems or fragments of longer works. He did not print the name of the author, the title, or the date, in order to decontextualize the text for study. He told the students to work with the text with no additional information. From these studies, he wrote Practical Criticism in 1929, from which the movement took its name in England. Richards included the reaction of the reader in the study of the text, which contradicted his strict text-only approach.
Features of American New Criticism
It is more radical than Practical Criticism in advocating that literature consists of the words on the page and nothing more. New Critics argued that Richards committed mistakes in considering the reader part of the interpretation of the text. They thought that introducing external factors into the analysis distorted the meaning of the text and gave a deficient view of what the text actually meant. That is what we could call a reductive view of literature.
The New Critics thought that preceding critics had committed four types of mistakes, called fallacies.
The Four Fallacies Identified by New Critics
- Intentional fallacy (Author-related): When the critic confuses the true meaning of the text with the supposed intentions of the author.
- Affective fallacy (Reader-related): When the critic confuses the true meaning of the text with the readers' emotional reactions.
- Mimetic fallacy (Represented world): When the critic takes the literary work as an exact representation of reality.
- Communicative fallacy (Ideology/communication): When the critic confuses the poem with an instrument to communicate ideology, thought, doctrine, or anything. A poem is an instrument to produce aesthetic experiences, not to communicate messages.