The New New Criticism Antitheory, Autonomy, and the Literary Text from Object-Oriented Ontology to Postcritique

• Published in: The Comparatist Vol. 44; no. 1; pp. 135 - 155
• Main Author: DI LEO, JEFFREY R.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Chapel Hill University of North Carolina Press 01.10.2020; The University of North Carolina Press
• Subjects: 20th century; 21st century; Actor-network theory; Aesthetics; Ambiguity; Analysis; Autonomy (Philosophy); Criticism, Textual; Critics; Crítica literaria; Essays; Filosofía y literatura; Literary criticism; Literary theory; Metaphor; Metaphysics; Methods; ONTOLOGIES; Ontology; Ontología; Philosophy and literature; Politics; Siglo XX; Teoría literaria; Textual criticism; United States
• ISSN: 0195-7678; 1559-0887; 1559-0887
• DOI: 10.1353/com.2020.0008

[...]the contemporary depiction of text can be said to have the following four main characteristics: (1) Non-Autonomy-the contemporary text is regarded as co-extensive or integrated with the whole of signification; (2) Non-Stability-the contemporary text is unstable and changing; (3) Non-Coherence-the contemporary text exemplifies a total lack of coherence and definability; and (4) Non-Identity-the contemporary text has an indeterminate identity. Even if a text contained a high degree of ambiguity, the self-same text for the New Critic was also regarded as a coherent, unified, organic whole. [...]the unified, organic whole of the New Criticism functions as their "god-term," wherein to a certain extent, these critics "exchange the inerrancy of the biblical word for that of the poetic word" with ambiguity along with metaphor and irony becoming "the holy trinity of New Critical reading" (Duvall, New Criticism 594). [...]the identity and meaning of the literary object does not have any relation to the intention of the author, who for the New Critics, only functions as a critical diversion from the real object of attention: the text. According to the New Critics, the nature and limits of literature and the literary are always decidable on exclusively textual grounds; there is never any need to draw on context (e.g. history, biography, politics, etc.) in the analysis and understanding of literature.