1. New Critical Formalism
(American New Criticism)
(American New Criticism)
Emerged in the 1920s/30s in England with the humanist
critics I.A. Richards, F.R. Leavis, and T.S. Eliot and in
America with the “New Critics” Cleanth Brooks, Robert
Penn Warren and John Crowe Ransom
Marked the professionalization of American literary
studies in the form of the “New Criticism”

2. Privileged poetry as a repository of organic unity and social harmony,
counterpoised to the effects of industrialization and commercialization.
New Critics:
Considered poetry to resist commodification by the nature of its
specifically poetic operations.
Defined poetry by its FORMAL STRUCTURE:
A poem creates harmony out of opposites and tension: a formal structure in
which complexity and incoherence can be arranged and made visible.
This harmony is not stable, but rather a fusion of paradoxes that can only
be achieved by the creative imagination.
New Critics Warned against affective and intentional fallacies, as well
as the “heresy of paraphrase” (reducing a poem to a thematic
statement).

3. Structuralism

4. For Structuralists,
meaning derives from:
meaning derives from:
Timeless, universal structures that form stable and self-
contained systems of binary oppositions.
Signifiers that carry meaning only in relation to one another
within a given system.
An arbitrary relationship between the signifier and the
signified.

5. • Idealist (Platonic): God is the origin, center and guarantor of meaning.
• Humanist: The self is the source of meaning, which is expressed
intentionally through language.
• Structuralist: Structure is at the center of a signifying system, is an
impersonal force.
• All narratives are variations on universal patterns.
• Structure originates and produces meaning, which is therefore to be
understood as the ultimate coherence of the structure itself.
The “Centers” of Meaning

6. Claude Lévi-Strauss
Structural Anthropology (1958)
(1958)
Following Saussure (as well as Slavic linguist Roman
Jakobson), Lévi-Strauss sought to systematize a
semiology of culture.
Recast anthropology as a cultural model for understanding how
the human mind functions universally.
Examined tribal cultures, in particular the the cultural value
of totems (empowered representations of the non-human
world) and taboos (prohibitions) as illuminative of the basic
structural units of human binary thought.

7. Tribal communities apply substitutions (metaphors) and combinations
(metonyms) to think about/make sense of the non-human in “code-
chains” or “sign-series”:
|
Kinship
Society
Human Culture
Gods
Non-human nature
Vegetable | Animal

8. Structurally speaking, all linguistic
representation can be understood as
“Utterance,” that is, as manifestations of a
system that lends order to the radical
heterogeneity of language (langue vs.
parole).
Structure is always recoverable because all
representation enacts and reproduces the
basic assumptions of a culture.

9. The Oedipus Myth

12. Lacan’s Reworking of the Freudian Psyche
Freud
Ego
Son/Daug
hter
Id
Mother
Superego
Father
Lacan
Real Imaginary
Symbolic

13. The Orders of Psychic Phenomena
• The Real: an undifferentiated ontological absolute (being in
itself); outside of language, resistant to symbolization,
inaccessible to the conscious mind, impossible to attain or
even imagine. [The Referent]
• The Imaginary: “the little other”: realm of image and
imagination, illusory wholeness, synthesis. [The Signified]
• Like Freud’s dream, the “Imaginary is only
decipherable if rendered into symbols”
• The Symbolic: The “Big Other”
• The name-of-the-father (nom-de-Père)
• The phallus/phallic power; the law
• LANGUAGE: [The Signifier]

14. The Mirror Stage

15. • Lacan’s 1936 theory of the structure of the
subject.
• Explores the implications of the statement that
the “unconscious is structured like a language,”
i.e. that it is split in the manner described by
Saussure.
• Describes the formation of the Ego (or “the
subject”) as a relation to the specular image of
the body initiated by the entry into language (i.e.
into the Symbolic order).

16. In the mirror phase, the infant sees its body as a whole and is thus
permanently caught and captivated by his own image, which cannot be
reconciled with the fragmentary nature of how the Real is experienced, nor
how subjectivity is expressed through language.
The subject’s “recognition” of holistic being and joy at the anticipation of
bodily mastery and integration is thus a “misrecognition” (méconnaissance).
The subject becomes permanently alienated from himself and seeks to heal
this split through language, which can only ceaselessly rearticulate this split.