Three things.
1. New Criticism (which is just close reading, after all) requires
understanding the meaning of the words, presumably as the author and
contemps understood them, and that requires history. Otherwise we'd
have to assume that in the old days a lot of people were silly and
few were innocewnt. Which may of course be true.
2. The "meaning" of a text is to a lesser or greater extent embedded
in its time. I suppose one could enjoy the wit of Absalom and
Achitophel without knowing a whit about the Restoration, but then one
would be not so much reading as doing a homophonic translation.
3. The question, I think, is what one wishes to understand--how a
silly modern reader would read it, or how the intended audience might
have read it (some texts work either way, but many don't, and the two
readings rarely correspond). I'll make a stretch and say that the
intended audience, always a figment of the author's imagination, is
always embedded in the text.
Best,
Mark
At 11:25 AM 3/18/2010, you wrote:
>Isnt that 'ground bass' Robin?
>
>But I tend to agree with your take on New Criticism; or at least, once
>taught it, it's difficult to get totally out from under it (& what's
>wrong about paying such close attention to a text, anyway?)....
>
>Doug
>On 18-Mar-10, at 8:22 AM, Robin Hamilton wrote:
>
>>Less that New Historicists are not, or less, concerned with the
>>historical context as that, unlike the Old Historicists, they don't
>>see this context as homogeneous so much as fractured. And the
>>marxism isn't something that intrudes, simply an unstated ground-
>>base assumption.
>>
>>>You and I, as fate would have it, were luckily (?) forced by our
>>>professors
>>>to criticise poems and plays WITHOUT historical contexts.
>>
>>Yeah, good old New Criticism -- "Treat every text as if it were
>>written by an anonymous writer yesterday." It's amazing how well
>>this actually worked, and I found it all profoundly liberating, well
>>before New Historicism was even a gleam in eternity's eye. In an
>>odd way, I don't find any opposition between New Criticism and New
>>Historicism. The best side of New Criticism, the ferociously close
>>attention to the detail of a text, never did die, but simply got
>>absorbed as a given into other kinds of criticism.
>
>Douglas Barbour
>[log in to unmask]
>
>http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
>
>Latest books:
>Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
>http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
>Wednesdays'
>http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-press_10.html
>
> The secret
>
>which got lost neither hides
>nor reveals itself, it shows forth
>
>tokens.
>
> Charles Olson
Announcing The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry (University
of California Press).
http://go.ucpress.edu/WholeIsland
"Not since the 1982 publication of Paul Auster's Random House Book of
Twentieth Century French Poetry has a bilingual anthology so
effectively broadened the sense of poetic terrain outside the United
States and also created a superb collection of foreign poems in
English. There is nothing else like it." John Palattella in The
Nation
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