New Criticism is one of, if not the most useful lenses to you in our study of literary criticism approaches. It’s basically the one you use in all your English classes, the one the vast majority of your teachers have been trained in, and the one you will be expected to write in on the AP Lit and Comp Exam come May.
New Criticism basically deals with the text itself, how it uses all our favorite terms such as irony, figurative language, narrative structure and many others—to explain how these smaller elements of a text contribute to a bigger picture. THIS IS EXACTLY THE KIND OF ANALYSIS YOU WILL BE DOING ON THE AP LIT EXAM. One thing you will hear often from me this year is “So what?” It’s SIMPLY NOT ENOUGH to point out examples of irony, paradox, imagery, metaphors, patterns, yada yada yada… you must think about how these various elements combine and serve a bigger purpose. What, by how she uses these elements, is the author going for? How do all these elements contribute to a unity of message? TO THE WORK AS A WHOLE. (You will learn to love THAT phrase!) Another phrase you will hear often: No WHAT without a HOW. No HOW without a WHY. I will pound this into your brains, I promise you! So, for this posting… Take a symbol, an image, a character, a phrasing…anything from the text, and think about why the author HAD to do the thing he chose to do. For the purpose of the story, WHY something had to be described in the way it was (the Death Car, for example). WHY a character had to be characterized the way he or she was (Daisy dressing in white, for example). WHY a symbol was used (the eyes of T.J. Eckleburg, for example). And so on. How do these things contribute to the unity of the work as a whole, the overall message you think Fitzgerald was trying to get at?
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