The idea of New Criticism at the base line seems like a dream come true for students. You just have to read the text and nothing else, no studying history, and biographies, all you need is a good dictionary (or Internet access) and your set.
The question is, can you come to the right interpretation of a text without knowing its historical context or anything about the author. I think you can find relevance in a piece without knowing about the author or histroy. You don't need to be a Shakespeare expert to see the importants of works like Hamlet and how it deals with the struggles of human nature.
How many people though can actually be good New Critics. If you know about these theories and criticisms, most likely, you know about the works you are reading about, and the time periods these people were writing in. The question comes back to the "innocent reader" you can find meaning within works you know nothing about the history or the author, but how many critcs know nothing, and how can you forget about the details you do know when looking at a text?
I have read works that I know nothing about the context it is written in, and have come up with meanings and felt their power. I found though that often when I do find out more about what the author was going through at the time the text was written it adds more meaning and understanding to the work.
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ReplyDeleteBeautifully put:
ReplyDelete"You don't need to be a Shakespeare expert to see the importance of works like Hamlet and how it deals with the struggles of human nature."
The only thing I would add to that, perhaps you'll agree—maybe not, is that before I took Shakespeare101, I did not know how to look at a piece of literature the way Shakespeare's plays require you to. "Require" may be an overstatement, more appropriate: "Allow." Shakespeare works have an entire matrix of meaning and connections beneath their surfaces. So while I agree 100% with you that you don't need to "be a Shakespeare expert to see the importance of works," I would only add that being taught to analyze the work opens up an entire underworld (i.e. more than meets the eye) that more than likely would not have been known about. This is all simply advocating the knowledge of Literary Criticism—being taught to analyze “allows” us to see things we may have otherwise not seen.