New Criticism
Paying careful attention to the text itself and what the words on the page mean.
What is close reading?
A system of comparison's and relations which produces meaning.
What is difference based reality?
Seemingly singular or stable meanings give way to a ceaseless play of language that multiplies meanings.
What is free-floating signifiers?
Psychoanalysis of an author, of a particularly interesting character in a text or film, or the audience.
What is the goal of psychoanalytic criticism?
Interpreting the world by juxtaposing two opposite concepts against each other.
What is binary opposition? (structuralism)
Author history and culture is meaningless, the only thing that matters is the text itself.
What is intrinsic criticism?
Studying instances to understand the whole and studying the general whole to understand the parts.
What is the hermeneutic circle?
How the meaning scatters, spreads, and multiples and how, in the process of accumulating, meanings can be lost.
What is dissemination?
A dynamic system that stores suppressed or unresolved personal conflicts as well as biographical memories.
What is the unconscious?
Critiquing a text by assuming the author's intended meaning rather than an actual response to the text.
What is intentional fallacy? (new criticism)
A systematic, rigorous, theorized approach to literature
What is it new critics wanted?
Writing or reading a text in relation to another.
What is intertextuality?
The free play of the text's signifiers goes beyond the capacity of the system to confine it to one meaning or a set or meanings.
What is undecidability?
A process by which we suppress wishes and desires that are too difficult for our psyches to handle by representing them with less threatening and more acceptable wishes and desires.
What is Displacement?
Taking something familiar and looking at it from a different or unfamiliar perspective.
What is defamiliarization?
The belief that an admirable literary work forms an organic whole, complete and self-sufficient.
What is organic unity?
Describing or interpreting the system of the text.
What is the goal of structuralists?
Two part reading process used by deconstructionists to interpret literature. The first reading, a singular interpretation of the text is developed without multiplicity or deconstruction. In the second reading, a deconstructionist interpretation of the problem is developed that decanters the text and undermine the structure.
What is double reading?
Taking the expectations and perceptions we experience with one person and transfer them to another.
What is transference?
Using certain words to get an idea across but marking the use as provisional.
What is Bracketing? (deconstruction)
Using impressionism, reading aloud, moralizing, and reading aloud.
What are critics before new criticism
Rejected by structuralism because of the belief that reality has been constructed through language.
What is essentialism?
Deconstructionists look for this to frustrate any interpretation of the text as holding a singular, stable meaning.
What is internal contradictions?
Acquisition of language and involves the experience of separation from others?
What is the Symbolic Order?
Redirecting repressed drives into other activities, like writing.
What is the sublimation? (psychoanalysis)