The New Criticism, Structuralism, New Historical And African American Criticism

The article “Controversial Blackness: The Historical Development & Future Trajectory of African American Studies,” was written by Martha Biondi, a European Associate Professor of African American Studies and History at Northwestern University.

in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 312.

The criticism that I will be using is a rhetorical analysis which simply means analyzing texts on how they make the audience feel using symbols, the type of genre, aesthetics and more while also looking at why that happens. I decided to use a rhetorical

New Criticism posits that in order to understand a work, one must focus solely on the work looking at, for example, its figures of speech among other elements and how such add to the organic unity (the coming together

New historicism is premised upon an ideological attempt to wed the practice of history and literary criticism. In this type of textual analysis, the literary work is juxtaposed with historical events (characteristic of the time period in which the work was produced) in an effort to understand the implications within the text. This line of inquiry serves to recover a "historical consciousness" which may be utilized in the rendering of literary theory. "Poems and novels came to be seen in isolation, as urnlike objects of precious beauty. The new historicists, whatever their differences and however defined, want us to see that even the most unlike poems are caught in a web of historical conditions,

It is appropriate to say that the conditions of Blacks in the past have improved since various Black power movements. The twenty first century generation of African Americans continues to be content with the accomplishments’ of our ancestors, instead of becoming more aware of our heritage and culture in order to understand the present. Renée Stout’s art develop from Black movements such as Garveyism and the Pan-Africanism movements that aimed to instill racial pride and racial unity. Just as these movements made Blacks around the Diaspora aware of the conditions of other Blacks, Stout’s exhibit, Tales of the Conjure Woman, unveil the oppressed culture of Africans and African Americans while instilling racial pride and unity.

Kenneth Burke, in “Psychology and Form” and “Lexicon Rhetoricae,” two brief essays in his book Counterstatement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), writes that the most profound effects of a work of art are created by the repetition of form; the creation of expectations in a reader through repeated and carefully varied devices, as well as through information, enhances our excitement about information by baffling our emotional expectation, and finally satisfies us with increasingly complex style and devices as well as with plot complications. Language, symbolism, and dramatic action fuse at the end of the work. Burke cautions us to beware of the tyranny of the informational, as characters, and even authors—especially the humorist

The standardization of European scholarship places limitations on how the marginal subject can articulate its existence. Barbara Christian’s “The Race for Theory” asks “For whom are we doing what we are doing when we do literary criticism?” Davies would respond to this query by stating that current scholarship is written to and for the center. Based

Structural Functionalism is a paradigm based on the assumption that society is a unified whole that functions because of the contributions of its separate structures (Ferris and Stein

Forum 17.4 (Autumn 1976): 3-11. Rpt. in Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800. Ed. Thomas J. Schoenberg and Lawrence J. Trudeau. Vol. 101. Detroit: Gale, 2004. Literature Resource Center. Web. 6 July 2015.

The structural functionalism approach is a framework for all parts of society to work and function together. This theory points to social structure, which

In sociology, there are three major theories. These theories are Structural Functionalism, Conflict Theory and Symbolic Interaction. There are many people who have influenced all three of these theories. Although not all of these theories are still used much now, the thoughts and views that emerged from these theories are still referenced to this day. Ideas used in these theories helped shape new theories and teach us a lot about understanding society and what shapes it.

The research method I have demonstrated in this paper is called Pentadic Criticism derived from Kenneth Burke whom made

the whole novel: “the linguistic pattern of choices realizes a primitive pattern of cognition, which in turn is the key to the tragic vision of the novel.”(Leech & Short, 2001: 32) Halliday being the widely acknowledged precursor of functional stylistics, the eminent German linguist-critic Leo Spitzer (1887-1960), is likewise father of literary stylistics. In his insistence that the smallest detail of language can unlock the “soul” of a literary work, he maintains the task of stylistics is to provide a hard-and-fast technology of analysis: I would maintain that to formulate observation by means of words is not to cause the artistic beauty to evaporate in vain intellectualities; rather, it makes for a widening and deepening of the aesthetic taste. It is only a frivolous love that cannot survive intellectual definition; great love prospers with understanding. (Leech & Short, 2001: 2) A question which is often asked in this connection is “At which end do we start, the aesthetic or the linguistic?” The image used by Spitzer of the “philological circle”, the circle of understanding, however, seems to suggest there is no logical staring point. Spitzer argues that the task of Linguistic-literary explanation proceeded by the movement to and fro from linguistic details to the

New historicism was born in the end of 1970s. It is one of the most important theories of literary criticism. It is different from the old historicism. New historicism stressed that the implementation of a comprehensive reading of texts from political power, ideology, cultural hegemony perspectives, formalism. Its research focuses on literature and life, literature and history, literature and power discourse. The New historicism breaks the kind of wordplay deconstruction strategy, making the recovery of historical consciousness becomes an important methodological principles of literary criticism and literary studies. Some scholars hold the view that the new historicism is sure to permeate in all the fields of literature. Main animateurs of new historicism are Stephen Greenblatt and Hayden White. Stephen Greenblatt attached importance to research the self-shaping of renaissance. He regarded literature as the history of reshaping human’s heart. He tended to create cultural poetics of historical context. Hayden White engaged in the history of consciousness in 19th century. He advocated the narrative historical poetic theory.