Literary Criticisms No Longer New

New Criticism

New criticism stands for an attitude to texts that sees them as works of art in their own right, rather than as representations of the sensibilities of their authors. Against the romantic view of texts as giving immediate access to the ideas and feelings of great minds, the new criticism regards texts as coherent intelligible wholes more or less independent of their authors, creating meaning through the integration of their elements. And against a more positivistic scholarship of the historical-critical kind, new criticism emphasizes the literariness of literary texts and tries to identify the characteristics of literary writing.

In biblical studies the term 'new criticism' has been rarely used, but most work that is known as 'literary'-whether it studies structure, themes, character, and the like, or whether it approaches the texts as unified wholes rather than the amalgam of sources, or whether it describes itself as 'synchronic' rather than 'diachronic', dealing with the text as it stands rather than with its prehistory-can properly be regarded as participating in this approach.

Rhetorical Criticism

Rhetorical criticism, sharing the outlook of new criticism about the primacy of the text in itself, and often operating under the banner of 'the final form of the text', concerns itself with the way the language of texts is deployed to convey meaning. Its interests are in the devices of writing, in metaphor and parallelism, in narrative and poetic structures, in stylistic figures. In principle, but not often in practice in Hebrew Bible studies, it has regard to the rhetorical situation of the composition and promulgation of ancient texts and to their intended effect upon their audience. But, like new criticism, its primary focus is upon the texts and their own internal articulation rather then upon their historical setting.

Structuralism

Structuralist theory concerns itself with patterns of human organization and thought. In the social sciences, structuralism analyses the structures that underlie social and cultural phenomena, identifying basic mental patterns, especially the tendency to construct the world in terms of binary oppositions, as forming models for social behaviour. In literary criticism likewise, structuralism looks beneath the phenomena, in this case the texts, for the underlying patterns of thought that come to expression in them. Structuralism proper shades off on one side into semiotics and the structural relations of signs, and on the other into narratology and the systems of construction that underlie both traditional and literary narratives

The New Literary Criticisms

Feminist Criticism

Feminist criticism can be seen as a paradigm for the new literary criticisms. For its focus is not upon texts in themselves but upon texts in relation to another intellectual or political issue; and that could be said to be true of all the literary criticisms represented in this volume. The starting point of feminist criticism is of course not the given texts but the issues and concerns of feminism as a world view and as a political enterprise. If we may characterize feminism in general as recognizing that in the history of civilization women have been marginalized by men and have been denied access both to social positions of authority and in<thorn>uence and to symbolic production (the creation of symbol systems, such as the making of texts), then a feminist literary criticism will be concerned with exposing strategies by which women's subordination is inscribed in and justi<THORN>ed by texts. Feminist criticism uses a variety of approaches and encourages multiple readings, rejecting the notion that there is a 'proper way' to read a text as but another expression of male control of texts and male control of reading. It may concentrate on analysing the evidence contained in literary texts, and showing in detail the ways in which women's lives and voices have in fact been suppressed by texts. Or it may ask how, if at all, a woman's voice can be discovered in, or read into, an androcentric text. Or it may deploy those texts, with their evidence of the marginalization of women, in the service of a feminist agenda, with the hope that the exposing of male control of literature will in itself subvert the hierarchy that has dominated not only readers but also culture itself.

Materialist or Political Criticism

In a materialist criticism, texts are viewed principally as productions, as objects created, like other physical products, at a certain historical juncture within a social and economic matrix and existing still within definite ambits constituted by the politics and the economics of book production and of readerships. More narrowly, materialist criticism analyses texts in terms of their representation of power, especially as they represent, allude to or repress the conflicts of different social classes that stand behind their composition and reception.

Psychoanalytic Criticism

A psychoanalytic criticism can take as its focus the authors of texts, the texts themselves, or the readers of the texts. Since authors serve their own psychological needs and drives in writing texts, their own psyches are legitimate subjects of study. It is not often we have access to the psyche of a dead author, but even if little can be said about the interior life of real authors, there is plenty to be inferred about the psyches of the authors implied by the texts. Just as psychoanalytic theory has shown the power of the unconscious in human beings, so literary critics search for the unconscious drives embedded within texts. We can view texts as symptoms of narrative neuroses, treat them as overdetermined, and speak of their repressions, displacements, con<thorn>icts and desires. Alternatively, we can uncover the psychology of characters and their relationships within the texts, and ask what it is about the human condition in general that these texts re<thorn>ect, psychologically speaking. Or we can turn our focus upon empirical readers, and examine the non-cognitive effects that reading our texts have upon them, and construct theoretical models of the nature of the reading process.

Reader Response

The critical strategies that may be grouped under the heading of reader response share a common focus on the reader as the creator of, or at the very least, an important contributor to, the meaning of texts. Rather than seeing 'meaning' as a property inherent in texts, whether put there by an author (as in traditional historical criticism) or somehow existing intrinsically in the shape, structure and wording of the texts (as in new criticism and rhetorical criticism), reader response criticism regards meaning as coming into being at the meeting point of text and reader-or, in a more extreme form, as being created by readers in the act of reading.
An obvious implication of a reader response position is that any quest for determinate meanings is invalidated; the idea of 'the' meaning of a text disappears and meaning becomes defined relative to the various readers who develop their own meanings. A text means whatever it means to its readers, no matter how strange or unacceptable some meanings may seem to other readers.
Reader response criticism further raises the question of validity in interpretation. If there are no determinate meanings, no intrinsically right or wrong interpretations, if the author or the text cannot give validation to meanings, the only source for validity in interpretation has to lie in 'interpretative communities'-groups that authorize certain meanings and disallow others. Validity in interpretation is then recognized as relative to the group that authorizes it.

Deconstruction

Deconstruction of a text signifies the identifying of the Achilles heel of texts, of their weak point that lets them down. As against the 'common sense' assumption that texts have more or less clear meanings and manage more or less successfully to convey those meanings to readers, deconstruction is an enterprise that exposes the inadequacies of texts, and shows how inexorably they undermine themselves. A text typically has a thesis to defend or a point of view to espouse; but inevitably texts falter and let slip evidence against their own cause. A text typically sets forth or takes for granted some set of oppositions, one term being privileged over its partner; but in so doing it cannot help allowing glimpses of the impossibility of sustaining those oppositions. In deconstruction it is not a matter of reversing the oppositions, of privileging the unprivileged and vice versa, but of rewriting, reinscribing, the structures that have previously been constructed. The deconstruction of texts relativizes the authority attributed to them, and makes it evident that much of the power that is felt to lie in texts is really the power of their sanctioning community.

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David J.A. Clines and J. Cheryl Exum, 'The New Literary Criticism', in
J. Cheryl Exum and David J.A. Clines (eds.),
The New Literary Criticism and the Hebrew Bible
(JSOTSup, 143; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1993), pp. 15-20.

http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/A-C/biblst/DJACcurrres/Postmodern1/Synchronic.html