Questions: New Criticism and Formalism

Question 1

A student argues that a poem about loneliness must be read in light of the poet's well-documented depression. A New Critic would most likely respond that:

• A. The poet's biography confirms the poem's meaning and should always be consulted
• B. This commits the intentional fallacy — meaning must be established through the poem's own formal evidence, not external biographical context
• C. The emotional impact on readers validates the student's biographical reading
• D. Historical context is always necessary before formal analysis can begin

Answer: (B)

The intentional fallacy, as defined by Wimsatt and Beardsley, is the error of treating the author's stated or inferred intention as the standard of textual meaning. Once the poem exists, it is a public object; what the poet 'meant' is inaccessible except through the text itself, making appeals to biography circular. New Criticism insists on the text as the sole evidentiary source. Options A and D directly contradict this methodological commitment.

Question 2

In New Criticism, what does 'organic unity' mean?

• A. A poem should draw its imagery exclusively from the natural world
• B. The parts of a poem are so integrated that altering any element would change the meaning of the whole
• C. Organic unity means the poem lacks formal constraints like meter or rhyme, expressing natural speech
• D. A poem achieves organic unity when its emotional tone matches the poet's lived experience

Answer: (B)

Organic unity is the New Critical ideal that a poem's elements — diction, imagery, irony, rhythm, structure — are not decorative additions but constitutive parts of a unified whole, like organs in a body. You cannot remove or replace a piece without transforming everything else. This is why, for New Critics, paraphrase is always a 'heresy': it extracts a propositional 'content' while discarding the formal elements that are inseparable from meaning.

Question 3

For New Critics, the meaning of a poem cannot be adequately captured by paraphrasing its propositional content.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: True

Cleanth Brooks explicitly called paraphrase a 'heresy' because it treats the poem as a roundabout vehicle for a thesis that could be stated directly. For New Critics, what the poem means is constituted by the formal whole — how irony, paradox, imagery, and structure work together. That formal whole cannot be distilled into a paraphrase without loss. The poem means what it is, not what can be extracted from it.

Question 4

The affective fallacy is the error of letting the author's emotions or intentions influence our interpretation of the text.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

This confuses the two fallacies. The *affective* fallacy is the error of judging a poem by its emotional effect on the *reader* — treating the reader's psychological response as the standard of literary value or meaning. The *intentional* fallacy is about the author's intentions or mental states. Students frequently conflate these two. Both fallacies are prohibited in New Criticism for the same reason: they shift attention away from the text to something outside it.

Question 5

Why do New Critics insist that the author's stated intention should not determine what a text means, and where do they locate meaning instead?

Model answer: Once a text is completed, it becomes an independent public object. The author's intention is not directly accessible — all we can read is the text, and any inference about intention is derived from the text itself, making the appeal circular. New Critics argue that meaning is not behind the text (in the author's mind) but in the text — produced by the formal arrangement of diction, imagery, irony, and structure. The text means what its formal properties generate, not what the author wished to communicate.

This position has the additional methodological benefit of making literary criticism replicable and teachable: multiple readers examining the same text can converge on what the formal elements do, whereas appeals to intention are unverifiable. Later critics (especially Foucault in 'What Is an Author?') extended this insight, but New Criticism made the practical case for text-immanent analysis.