Directions: How does new criticism help you in understanding the story? Write your answers in two bullets.
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Directions: How does new criticism help you in understanding the story? Write your answers in two bullets.
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How would you want people to judge you - based off what they've previously heard about you, or your words and actions as you interact with them? Most people would want to be judged off their own words and actions. Even though our histories and reputations are important, there's a reason why we hear again and again not to 'judge a book by its cover.'
According to New Criticism, we should judge books the same way. Rather than worrying about the author's background or our own reactions to a book, we should evaluate work based only on the text itself. Since we're only dealing with the text, we'd be doing what's called a close reading, which requires taking apart a text and looking at its individual elements, such as theme, setting, plot, and structure, for example.
Prior to the 1920s, literary criticism took a largely historical slant. To understand a text, critics often looked to its historical background and the history of the language used in the text. But in 1929, a literary critic at Cambridge by the name of Ivor Armstrong Richards published Practical Criticism. His book reported on an experiment that involved people reading and responding to poems without knowing who the authors were. Richards was interested in why people responded to these poems the way they did.