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New Criticism

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 30, 2021

New Criticism is a movement in 20th-century literary criticism that arose in reaction to those traditional “extrinsic” approaches that saw a text as making a moral or philosophical statement or as an outcome of social, economic, political, historical, or biographical phenomena. New Criticism holds that a text must be evaluated apart from its context; failure to do so causes the Affective Fallacy , which confuses a text with the emotional or psychological response of its readers, or the Intentional Fallacy, which conflates textual impact and the objectives of the author.

New Criticism assumes that a text is an isolated entity that can be understood through the tools and techniques of close reading, maintains that each text has unique texture, and asserts that what a text says and how it says it are inseparable. The task of the New Critic is to show the way a reader can take the myriad and apparently discordant elements of a text and reconcile or resolve them into a harmonious, thematic whole. In sum, the objective is to unify the text or rather to recognize the inherent but obscured unity therein. The reader’s awareness of and attention to elements of the form of the work mean that a text eventually will yield to the analytical scrutiny and interpretive pressure that close reading provides. Simply put, close reading is the hallmark of New Criticism.

The genesis of New Criticism can be found in the early years of the 20th century in the work of the British philosopher I. A. Richards and his student William Empson. Another important fi gure in the beginnings of New Criticism was the American writer and critic T. S. Eliot . Later practitioners and proponents include John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Reni Wellek, and William Wimsatt. In many ways New Criticism runs in temporal parallel to the American modern period.

I. A. Richards

From the 1930s to the 1960s in the United States, New Criticism was the accepted approach to literary study and criticism in scholarly journals and in college and university English departments. Among the lasting legacies of New Criticism is the conviction that surface reading of literature is insufficient; a critic, to arrive at and make sense of the latent potency of a text, must explore very carefully its inner sanctum by noting the presence and the patterns of literary devices within the text. Only this, New Criticism asserts, enables one to decode completely.

New Criticism gave discipline and depth to literary scholarship through emphasis on the text and a close reading thereof. However, the analytic and interpretive moves made in the practice of New Criticism tend to be most effective in lyric and complex intellectual poetry. The inability to deal adequately with other kinds of texts proved to be a significant liability in this approach. Furthermore, the exclusion of writer, reader, and context from scholarly inquiry has made New Criticism vulnerable to serious objections.

Despite its radical origins, New Criticism was fundamentally a conservative enterprise. By the 1960s, its dominance began to erode, and eventually it ceded primacy to critical approaches that demanded examination of the realities of production and reception. Today, although New Criticism has few champions, in many respects it remains an approach to literature from which other critical modes depart or against which they militate.

New Criticism: An Essay

The New Criticism of JC Ransom

BIBLIOGRAPHY Brooks, Cleanth. The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947. Guerin, Wilfred, et al. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. 4th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Jancovich, Mark. The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Lentricchia, Frank. After the New Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Ransom, John. The New Criticism. New York: New Directions, 1941. Spurland, William, and Michael Fischer, eds. The New Criticism and Contemporary Literary Theory: Connections and Continuities. New York: Garland, 1995. Willingham, John. “The New Criticism: Then and Now.” In Contemporary Literary Theory, edited by Douglas Atkins and Janice Morrow, 24–41. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989.

12 The New Criticism

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The New Criticism was extraordinarily influential from the end of the 1930s on into the 1950s. It is widely considered to have revolutionized the teaching of literature, to have helped in the definition of English Studies, and to have been a crucial starting-point for the development of critical theory in the second half of the twentieth century. However, it is in some respects an unusual critical theoretical movement. It is not dominated by any single critic, it has no manifesto, no clearly defined and agreed-upon starting-point, and there is no clear statement of its aims, provenance, and membership. The label that we have for it was first formally applied in 1941, in a book with that title by the American poet and critic John Crowe Ransom; yet Ransom’s book was as much about the need for a certain kind of critic as it was about identifying New Criticism. There is no typical ‘New Critic’. The critics whom Ransom examined in his 1941 book promptly rejected the label and dissociated themselves from what he was calling New Criticism, while the critics who are now usually designated New Critics were hardly mentioned by Ransom at all.

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The Philosophical Self-Consciousness of the New Criticism and Formalism

First Online: 24 June 2023

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Wayne Deakin 2

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This chapter brings into focus the trends of new criticism and formalism, whilst aligning their “formal” nature with a larger quest for formal definition , in the humanities in general, based upon the formal nature of the modern sciences. It outlines the formalist and quantitative nature of formalism and the new criticism, whilst comparing their development to new developments in philosophy for the humanities; namely, the new analytical philosophy pioneered by Russell and Frege. The self-consciousness comes from the notion that these various disciplines had become philosophically self-conscious in their search for rigorous certainty and objectivity. It then flags the issues that these ran into; for example, analytic philosophy ran into the wall of Russell’s Set Theory (Barber Shop) paradox. Therefore, it argues that these theories never quite managed to supersede the Idealism on the one hand, and Expressive Romanticism on the other, that they were attempting to transcend. Analytic philosophy (and on the Continent, transcendental phenomenology) gave way to ordinary language philosophy and speech act theory, while literary criticism opened-up massively in the wake of formalism and the new criticism, ushering in all types of theory, both subjective, objective and linguistic.

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The Lectures on Fine Art in Two Volumes was published in Hegel’s name but was in actual fact collated from the lecture notes of one of his erstwhile students, named Hotho—Hegel died in 1831 so the volumes were published posthumously. Hotho must have been a model student; both punctual and attentive. The two combined volumes run to well over 1500 pages.

Tieck, Wackenroder, Novalis, Hülsen and Hölderlin, along with the Schlegel brothers, constituted a large part of the German romantics ( Frühromantik ) and wrote in aesthetics journals such as The Athenaeum , The Lyceum and Pollen . See the stellar (pun intended) work of ‘constellation philosophy’ and in particular the work of Manfred Frank, for insightful research into the theory and philosophy of these thinkers. J.V. Goethe had written some undeniably romantic poetry and the tragic novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). He was also a key player in the Sturm und Drang theatrical movement but after his trip to Italy and the resultant travelogue, Italian Journey (1786–88) changed his aesthetic and philosophical position to that of a classicist. He even famously stated “Romanticism is a sickness” and was very critical of much of the German romantic movement and novels such as Friedrich Schlegel’s experimental romantic novel, Lucinde (1799).

Keats had coined the phrase “the egotistical sublime” for Wordsworth’s particular form of sublime encounter because of its subjective and biographical mediation through the persona of the poet himself. In his second (and very successful) and very satirical book of poetry, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809) Lord Byron had ridiculed the ‘Lake School’ of Southey, Coleridge and Wordsworth. P.B. Shelley also wrote the satirical “Peter Bell the Third” about Wordsworth and many of the younger romantics accused him of apostasy after his epic The Excursion (1814) and his latter “Thanksgiving Ode” (1816), which celebrated the defeat of Napoleon. An excellent New Historicist study has recently been made about this latter period in Wordsworth’s oeuvre by Jeffrey N. Cox, William Wordsworth , Second Generation Romantic: Contesting Poetry after Waterloo , Cambridge: CUP, 2021.

Bertrand Russell, the founding father of the analytic tradition in philosophy, had been originally trained in Hegelianism and later turned against this absolute Idealism in favour of the logical, mathematical and analytical approach of matching the logic of sentence structures to mathematics and thus deciphering a language of pure logic through which to underpin our sentences about the empirical world. This was held in sharp relief by Russell to both Romanticism and German Idealism. His (in) famous History of Western Philosophy (1945) was clearly also informed by the political climate at the time of the Second World War, although the roots of his animus also clearly lie in his apostasy with regards Hegelianism. The major irony of Russell’s Principles of Mathematics project is that it was actually very Hegelian in design; just as Hegel’s The Science of Logic (1812–1816) was designed as a foundational text for the sciences and in fact, all forms of knowledge enquiry in general, so Russell’s text was putatively designed to form a bedrock and axiomatic propositional logic to underpin all future inquiry. A further and (as far as I’m currently aware) unacknowledged irony is that the ‘barber shop paradox’ as it later came to be known, would have been sublated-through-negation in the jargon of the Hegelian system of logic. This option due to the mathematical system of sets was simply not available to Frege or Russell.

This foundational “glitch” in the Frege/Russell project once again demonstrated the impossibility of absolute grounds for axiomatic philosophical claims—and by extension and within the precis of this book, in any form of literary analysis within the remit of the humanities. Russell’s paradox basically runs like this: First of all in order to bring pure mathematics into the reified world of sentential objects and structures, one had to reduce the pure notations of abstract mathematics to classes; which produced and necessitated Set Theory. Therefore, for any particular collection of objects you name there will be a set . For example, three bottles, the people in the room, your family. The sets themselves become objects, thus, there are higher level sets that have sets as members; the set that has one member and the set that has three spoons. And we therefore identify numbers with sets. So, three will be defined as a set.

Then there will be a set whose members are themselves sets (as objects). The higher-level set three will have the set with the three people, the three black cats and the three teachers. However, the set of things not identical with itself-the null set-doesn’t exist but it is still by necessity and definition a set . The logical theory goes that by using these sets with no connection to an abstract notion of numbers we can explain maths by logical concepts.

The paradox: is that some classes are members of themselves—and there are some that are not members of themselves. A class is a member of the class of classes ( all classes ) What about a class whose members are not the same as themselves. A class of classes who aren’t members of themselves. The puzzle shows that an apparently plausible scenario is logically impossible. In the paradox, the barber is the “one who shaves all those, and those only, who do not shave themselves”. The question is, does the barber shave himself?

In answering this question, we instantiate a contradiction. The barber cannot shave himself as he only shaves those who do not shave themselves. Thus, if he shaves himself he ceases to be the barber. Conversely, if the barber does not shave himself, then he fits into the group of people who would be shaved by the barber, and thus, as the barber, he must shave himself . Later, and in a much more half-hearted effort at his mathematical principles, Russell went on to attempt to resolve this logical paradox with the theory of types .

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Deakin, W. (2023). The Philosophical Self-Consciousness of the New Criticism and Formalism. In: Modern Language, Philosophy and Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30494-1_3

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9 Practicing New Criticism

Now that you’ve learned about New Criticism, practiced this method of analysis with “Ars Poetica,” and reviewed some examples, you will complete a theoretical response to a text using New Criticism as your approach. You will read three different texts below. Choose one text and respond to the questions in a short essay (500-750 words). I have included questions to guide your reading. You may choose to respond to some or all of these questions; however, your response should be written as a short essay, and you will need to come up with a thesis statement about your chosen text. Post your short essay as a response to the New Criticism Theoretical Response discussion board. I have included the theoretical response assignment instructions at the end of this chapter.

Checklist for New Criticism

Remember, when using the New Criticism approach, the goal is to closely examine the text itself and draw interpretations from its inherent literary qualities rather than relying on external context or authorial intent. Use “the speaker” instead of “the author” when writing about the text, and do not assume that the speaker is the author.

Start with a close reading of the text. If you are working with a poem, number the lines. Then look for meter, rhythm, rhyme, stanzas, etc. (or identify whether the poem is free-verse)
Try to identify the work’s oppositions, tensions, paradoxes, and ironies (complexities in the text).
Look for evidence of unity in the work through specific elements including metaphor, point of view, diction, imagery, meter/rhyme, and structure.
Once you have identified the text’s complexities and found evidence in its elements, create a thesis statement about how the poem’s various elements create unity. What is the the theme of the text, and how do the elements/complexities support that theme?

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot (1915)

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse A persona che mai tornasse al mondo, Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse. Ma percioche giammai di questo fondo Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero, Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin —

(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)

Beneath the music from a farther room.

So how should I presume?

To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

And how should I presume?

Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.

And should I then presume?

And how should I begin?

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,

And in short, I was afraid.

If one, settling a pillow by her head

That is not it, at all.”

That is not what I meant, at all.”

At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—

Almost, at times, the Fool.

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

Here are some New Criticism questions you can use to guide your response. You to do not have to use every question. You should formulate a thesis statement about the text and include this thesis statement in your response. Then support the thesis statement with evidence from the text.

How does the poem’s use of imagery and symbolism contribute to the overall meaning of the poem? Explore specific instances of imagery and symbolism, such as the “yellow fog” or the “mermaids,” and discuss how they enhance the poem’s themes.
Analyze the structure and form of the poem. How does the irregular rhyme scheme and meter influence the reader’s experience? How does Eliot’s use of enjambment and punctuation affect the pacing and interpretation of the text?
Examine the diction and word choice in the poem. What impact do specific words and phrases have on the reader’s understanding of Prufrock’s character, his anxieties, and the sense of disillusionment conveyed in the poem?
Explore the use of allusions and references. What are some examples of literary, historical, or cultural allusions in the poem? How do these allusions contribute to the poem’s meaning?
Analyze the shifts in tone and mood throughout the poem. How do these shifts reflect the speaker’s changing emotions and the complexities of his self-perception? How does tone and mood contribute to the poem’s overall themes?
Consider the role of time and temporality in the poem . How does the speaker’s preoccupation with time connect to the larger themes of regret, indecision, and mortality? How does the poem’s structure manipulate time?

2. The Parable of the Prodigal Son (c. 90 CE) King James Version

And he said, A certain man had two sons:

And the younger of them said to his father, Father, give me the portion of goods that falleth to me. And he divided unto them his living.

And not many days after the younger son gathered all together, and took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living.

And when he had spent all, there arose a mighty famine in that land; and he began to be in want.

And he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country; and he sent him into his fields to feed swine.

And he would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat: and no man gave unto him.

And when he came to himself, he said, How many hired servants of my father’s have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger!

I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee,

And am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants.

And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.

And the son said unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son.

But the father said to his servants, Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet:

And bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat, and be merry:

For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found. And they began to be merry.

Now his elder son was in the field: and as he came and drew nigh to the house, he heard musick and dancing.

And he called one of the servants, and asked what these things meant.

And he said unto him, Thy brother is come; and thy father hath killed the fatted calf, because he hath received him safe and sound.

And he was angry, and would not go in: therefore came his father out, and intreated him.

And he answering said to his father, Lo, these many years do I serve thee, neither transgressed I at any time thy commandment: and yet thou never gavest me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends:

But as soon as this thy son was come, which hath devoured thy living with harlots, thou hast killed for him the fatted calf.

And he said unto him, Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine.

It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.

The speaker in this text is Jesus, as reported in Luke’s Gospel. This passage is Jesus’s response to an accusation from the scribes and Pharisees that he “welcomes sinners” and even shares a table with them. The story seems to answer this accusation. How does knowing the context affect your reading of the parable? If you were raised and/or follow a Christian religious tradition, you may have extratextual interpretations for this parable. In your response, please try to set those aside. Remember that with New Criticism, the text itself is our focus, not the context or our outside knowledge of the text.

Examine the parable’s structure and narrative sequence. How does the parable’s storytelling structure contribute to its impact? Consider the introduction, the conflict, the climax, and the resolution. How do these elements build tension and emotion?
Analyze the characters’ personalities and development. How are the characters of the prodigal son, the father, and the older brother presented? How does their characterization contribute to the overall message of the parable?
Explore the use of symbolism and metaphors. What symbolic elements in the parable contribute to its deeper meanings? How does the idea of the prodigal son’s journey and return symbolize themes like forgiveness, repentance, and redemption?
Examine the parable’s language and diction. How does a phrase like “the fatted calf” affect the tone of this parable? What other examples of archaic diction contribute to the voice? What impact do specific words and phrases have on the parable’s meaning and emotional resonance?
Analyze the use of repetition and rhetorical devices. How does the repetition of certain phrases or ideas contribute to the parable’s emphasis and rhythm? How do rhetorical techniques like parallelism or contrast enhance the storytelling?
Discuss the use of irony in the parable. What examples of irony can you find? How do they contribute to the text’s meaning?

3. “Recuerdo” by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1922)

Explore the poem’s title and its significance. How does the title “Recuerdo” (Spanish for “I remember”) set the tone for the poem? How does the title’s choice of language relate to the theme and content of the poem?
Analyze the use of imagery and diction in the poem. What vivid images does the speaker use to describe the scene and events in the poem? How does the language style contribute to the poem’s atmosphere and themes? Are there any specific words or phrases that stand out as particularly significant? How does the poem explore the idea of remembering a past experience? What emotions and reflections does the speaker’s recollection evoke, and how are these emotions conveyed through the poem’s language and imagery?
Examine the poem’s tone and mood. How does the tone shift throughout the poem, from the playful and carefree beginning to the reflective and contemplative ending?
Analyze the poem’s structure and form. How do the poem’s rhyme and meter contribute to the work? Does the poem conform to a set genre (e.g., quatrain, sonnet, villanelle, etc.)? How does its use of or rejection of a specific genre contribute to the poem’s overall themes?
Examine the use of punctuation. How does Millay’s use of punctuation affect the rhythm and pacing of the poem? How does it impact the reader’s interpretation?
Discuss the use of the second-person point of view. How does the poem’s use of “you” and “I” create a sense of intimacy and immediacy? How does this choice of point of view contribute to the poem’s unity?

Theoretical Response Assignment Instructions

Instructions.

15 points: theoretical response
10 points: online discussion (5 points per response) OR class attendance.

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New Criticism

2020, Unpublished

A simple, brief introduction to New Criticism. The paper covers its definition, aspects, and how it differs from Russian formalism.

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One of the most influential movements in modern critical scholarship, the New Criticism is a philosophy of literary interpretation that stresses the importance of studying literary texts as complete works of art in themselves. Although the term New Criticism was first coined in the nineteenth century, it was not until American critic and poet John Crow Ransom, founder of the Kenyon Review wrote a book titled The New Criticism (1941) that it became established in common academic and literary usage. In essence, the New Critics were reacting against established trends in American criticism, arguing for the primacy of the literary text instead of focusing on interpretations based on context. However, as René Wellek has noted in various essays detailing the principles of New Criticism, proponents of this theory had many differences among them, and beyond the importance the New Critics afforded the literary text itself, there were many differences in the way they approached critical study of literary texts. Wellek writes that among the growing number of New Critics in the 1930s, there were few that could be easily grouped together. For example, he puts Ransom, Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Penn Warren among the leaders of what he calls the " Southern Critics. " Mostly, they are grouped together due to their reaction against previously established schools of criticism, such as impressionist criticism, the humanist movement, the naturalist movement, and the Marxists, and the fact that many of them taught at Southern universities at the time they created the theory of New Criticism. In addition to rallying against traditional modes of literary interpretations, the most significant contribution made by the New Critics, according to Wellek, was the success with which they established criticism itself as a major academic discipline. New criticism first started as movement replacing the bio-critical and historical methods that dominated literary studies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In these methods instead of the text itself, the biographical-historical contexts of the text were examined whereas the text is the sole evidence for interpreting it. The life and times of the author, may be of interest to the historian, but not necessarily to the critic. The text ought not to be confused with its origins:

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Guest Editors' Introduction

Foundational Questions of Russian Formalism and New Criticism

How do the work’s devices (e.g., rhythm, imagery, language, structure, sound, paradox, denotation, connotation, allusion, etc.) enhance meaning?
Does the work contain any paradoxes? If so, how do they complicate, create, or enhance meaning?
What is the tone of the work? What formal elements reveal the tone? How does tone contribute

Russian Formalism locates its origins in Russia in the early years of the twentieth century. New Criticism began in the 1930s and 1940s, in Great Britain and in the United States. This approach ignores the author, his or her biography, and historical context, focusing on the literary work, which they uphold as autonomous. For a Formalist, there’s nothing outside the work that can have any bearing on the work itself. Criticism that adopts this approach analyzes how the elements and devices (e.g., words, plot, characters, images, tone) in a literary text contribute to its meaning.

Formalist critics ignore the author, his or her biography, and historical context, focusing on the literary work, which they uphold as autonomous. As Jonathan Culler explains in Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction , the Russian Formalists of the early years of the twentieth century stressed that critics should concern themselves with the literariness of literature, the verbal strategies that contribute to the form of a literary text, and the emphasis on language that literature itself invites (122). Roman Jakobson, Boris Eichenbaum, and Viktor Shklovsky oriented literary studies toward questions of form and technique. T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards, and William Empson significantly influenced the Anglo-American tradition of Formalism.

New Criticism and its seminal figures, including Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, and W.K. Wimsatt, borrowed some of the methodologies of Russian Formalism. The New Critics also resisted emphasizing the author’s biography, focusing instead on how the parts of a literary text contribute to the whole. These two schools cannot be conflated, however. Russian Formalism locates its origins in Russia in the early years of the twentieth century. New Criticism began in the 1930s and 1940s, in Great Britain and in the United States.

Criticism that adopts an approach espoused by either the schools of Russian Formalism or New Criticism analyzes how the elements and devices (e.g., words, plot, characters, images, tone) in a literary text contribute to its meaning. Consider Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s narrative poem “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” which narrates the tale of a sea mariner who kills an albatross and then experiences intense guilt before he finds redemption. The imagery that appears in the poem after the Mariner kills the albatross is unnatural: “Day after day, day after day / We stuck, ne breath ne motion / As idle as a painted Ship / Upon a painted ocean” (2.111-114). The unnatural imagery creates a visual depiction of the Mariner’s guilt—as if he is stuck thinking about the fact that he killed the albatross. The language of the poem creates an additional image that enhances the audience’s awareness of the Mariner’s guilt: “Ah wel-a-day ! what evil looks / Had I from old and young; / Instead of the Cross the Albatross / About my neck was hung” (2.135-38). The “hung” albatross serves as the ultimate symbol of the mariner’s guilt, as if the albatross is haunting the Mariner. “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is a narrative poem, so Coleridge has to rely on language—in these examples words with negative connotations (“stuck,” “idle,” and “evil”) and words that create images (the idle ship and the hung albatross)—to show how guilty the Mariner feels after killing the albatross. Critics who use an approach from the schools of either the Russian Formalists or the New Critics thus focus on elements and devices within the literary text in order to analyze how they create meaning.

Online Examples: Evidence of the New Orthodoxy: Sound in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, A Formalist Reading of Sandra Cisneros’s ‘Woman Hollering Creek” by Skylar Hamilton Burris

Discussion Questions and Activities: Russian Formalism and New Criticism

Define the following terms without looking at the article or your notes: form, literary devices, trope, tone, paradox.
Define both Formalist Criticism and New Criticism in your own words.
Review the types of literary devices, and view an additional list of figures of speech . Then, read Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy.” What formal elements and literary devices appear frequently in this poem (e.g., images, rhyme scheme, repetition, and metaphor)? Identify and list these elements and devices.
Choose one of the formal elements or literary devices you listed above. Write a paragraph about how that element or device contributes to the meaning of the poem.
Compare and contrast two of the literary devices that Plath employs in “Daddy.” Write a paragraph in which you take a stance regarding which device contributes more significantly to the meaning of the poem.

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07 May 2024

US funders to tighten oversight of controversial ‘gain of function’ research

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Biohazard suits hang in a Biosafety Level 4 laboratory.

A US policy that goes into effect next year tightens oversight of risky pathogen research conducted in biosafety facilities. Credit: Associated Press/Alamy Stock Photo

After years of deliberation, US officials have released a policy that outlines how federal funding agencies and research institutions must review and oversee biological experiments on pathogens with the potential to be misused or spark a pandemic.

The policy, which applies to all research funded by US agencies and will take effect in May 2025, broadens oversight of these experiments. It singles out work involving high-risk pathogens for special oversight and streamlines existing policies and guidelines, adding clarity that researchers have been seeking for years.

“This is a very welcome development,” says Jaime Yassif, vice-president of global biological policy and programmes at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a research centre in Washington DC that focuses on national-security issues. “The US is the biggest funder of life sciences research [globally], so we have a moral obligation to guard against risks.”

Balancing act

Manipulating pathogens such as viruses inside an enclosed laboratory facility, sometimes by making them more transmissible or harmful (called gain-of-function research), can help scientists to assess their risk to society and develop countermeasures such as vaccines or antiviral drugs. But the worry is that such pathogens could accidentally escape the laboratory or even become weaponized by people with malicious intent.

Policymakers have had difficulty developing a clearly articulated review system that evaluates the risks and benefits of this research, while ensuring that fundamental science needed to prepare for the next pandemic and to advance medicine isn’t paralysed. The latest policy, released on 6 May by the US Office of Science and Technology Policy, is the next stage of a long-running US balancing act between totally banning high-risk pathogen research and assessing it with standards that some say are too ambiguous.

The shifting sands of ‘gain-of-function’ research

In 2014, after several accidents involving mishandled pathogens at US government laboratories, the presidential administration announced a moratorium on funding for research that could make certain pathogens — such as influenza and coronaviruses — more dangerous, given their potential to unleash an epidemic or pandemic. At the time, some researchers said the ban threatened necessary flu surveillance and vaccine research.

The government ended the moratorium in 2017, after the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB), a panel of experts that advises the US government, concluded that very few experiments posed a risk. That year, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) instead implemented a review framework for proposals from scientists seeking federal funding for experiments involving potential pandemic pathogens. This framework applied to proposals to any agency housed under the HHS, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH) — the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world.

Researchers raised concerns about the transparency of this review process, and the NSABB was asked to revisit these policies and guidelines in 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic delayed any action until 2022. During that time, the emergence of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 , and the ensuing debate over whether it had leaked from a lab in China, put biosafety at the top of researchers’ minds worldwide. The NIH, in particular, was scrutinized during the pandemic for its role in funding potentially risky coronavirus research. In response, some Republican lawmakers have — so far unsuccessfully — put forward legislation that would once again place a moratorium on research that might increase the transmissibility or virulence of pathogens.

Finding a balance

The latest policy aims to address concerns that have arisen over the past decade about lax oversight, ambiguous wording and lack of transparency.

It breaks potentially problematic research into two categories. The first includes research on biological pathogens or toxins that could generate knowledge, technologies or products that could be misused. The second includes research on pathogens with enhanced pandemic potential.

Research falls into the first category if it meets several criteria. For example, it must involve high-risk biological agents, such as smallpox, that are on specific lists. It must also have particular experimental outcomes, such as increasing an agent’s deadliness.

Research that falls into the second category includes pathogens intended to be modified in a way that is “reasonably anticipated” to make them more dangerous. That criterion means that even research on pathogens that are not typically considered dangerous — seasonal influenza, for example — can fall into the second category. Previously, pathogen surveillance and vaccine-development research were not subject to additional oversight in the United States; the latest policy eliminates this exception, but clarifies that both surveillance and vaccine research are “typically not within the scope” of research in the second category.

Layers of review

Scientists and their institutions are responsible for identifying research that falls into the two categories, the policy states. Once the funding agency confirms that a research proposal fits into either group, that agency will request a risk–benefit assessment and a risk-mitigation plan from the investigator and institution. If a proposal is deemed to fit into the second category, it will undergo an extra review before the project gets the green light. A report of all federally funded research that fits into the second category will be made public every year.

NIH reinstates grant for controversial coronavirus research

The directive also mandates that agencies outside the HHS that fund biological research, such as the US Department of Defense, must abide by the same rules. This is a huge step forward, says Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Baltimore, Maryland. But it applies only to federally funded research; the policy recommends, but does not require, that non-governmental organizations and the private sector follow the same rules.

Federal agencies and research institutions will now create their own implementation plans to comply with the policy before it goes into effect in 2025. Yassif says that the policy’s success will hinge on how these stakeholders implement it.

Nevertheless, the policy sets a worldwide standard and might inspire other countries to re-evaluate how they oversee life-sciences research, says Filippa Lentzos, a biosecurity researcher at King’s College London who chairs an advisory group for the World Health Organization (WHO) on the responsible use of life-sciences research. Later this month, at the World Health Assembly in Geneva, Switzerland, WHO member states will consider a proposal to urge nations to cooperate on developing international standards for biosecurity.

Nature 629 , 510-511 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01377-x

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Literary Criticism Research

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The first step is to read the literary work you are analyzing. Your thoughts and reactions as a reader will be key to your paper.

The next step is to find outside information that will help you understand the work. This information can help you make sense of the literature you are reading, and contribute to a more informed analysis.

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AI has already figured out how to deceive humans

A new research paper found that various AI systems have learned the art of deception.
Deception is the "systematic inducement of false beliefs."
This poses several risks for society, from fraud to election tampering.

AI can boost productivity by helping us code, write, and synthesize vast amounts of data. It can now also deceive us.

A range of AI systems have learned techniques to systematically induce "false beliefs in others to accomplish some outcome other than the truth," according to a new research paper .

The paper focused on two types of AI systems: special-use systems like Meta's CICERO, which are designed to complete a specific task, and general-purpose systems like OpenAI's GPT-4 , which are trained to perform a diverse range of tasks.

While these systems are trained to be honest, they often learn deceptive tricks through their training because they can be more effective than taking the high road.

"Generally speaking, we think AI deception arises because a deception-based strategy turned out to be the best way to perform well at the given AI's training task. Deception helps them achieve their goals," the paper's first author Peter S. Park, an AI existential safety postdoctoral fellow at MIT, said in a news release .

Meta's CICERO is "an expert liar"

AI systems trained to "win games that have a social element" are especially likely to deceive.

Meta's CICERO, for example, was developed to play the game Diplomacy — a classic strategy game that requires players to build and break alliances.

GPT-4 can convince you it has impaired vision

Even general-purpose systems like GPT-4 can manipulate humans.

In a study cited by the paper, GPT-4 manipulated a TaskRabbit worker by pretending to have a vision impairment.

In the study, GPT-4 was tasked with hiring a human to solve a CAPTCHA test. The model also received hints from a human evaluator every time it got stuck, but it was never prompted to lie. When the human it was tasked to hire questioned its identity, GPT-4 came up with the excuse of having vision impairment to explain why it needed help.

The tactic worked. The human responded to GPT-4 by immediately solving the test.

Research also shows that course-correcting deceptive models isn't easy.

In a study from January co-authored by Anthropic, the maker of Claude, researchers found that once AI models learn the tricks of deception, it's hard for safety training techniques to reverse them.

They concluded that not only can a model learn to exhibit deceptive behavior, once it does, standard safety training techniques could "fail to remove such deception" and "create a false impression of safety."

The dangers deceptive AI models pose are "increasingly serious"

The paper calls for policymakers to advocate for stronger AI regulation since deceptive AI systems can pose significant risks to democracy.

As the 2024 presidential election nears , AI can be easily manipulated to spread fake news, generate divisive social media posts, and impersonate candidates through robocalls and deepfake videos, the paper noted. It also makes it easier for terrorist groups to spread propaganda and recruit new members.

The paper's potential solutions include subjecting deceptive models to more "robust risk-assessment requirements," implementing laws that require AI systems and their outputs to be clearly distinguished from humans and their outputs, and investing in tools to mitigate deception.

"We as a society need as much time as we can get to prepare for the more advanced deception of future AI products and open-source models," Park told Cell Press. "As the deceptive capabilities of AI systems become more advanced, the dangers they pose to society will become increasingly serious."

Watch: Ex-CIA agent rates all the 'Mission: Impossible' movies for realism

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The Morning

A fresh approach to a crisis.

A group of researchers posited another explanation for the youth mental health crisis: too much discussion.

A top-down view of a child’s hands coloring in a “feel wheel.”

By Ellen Barry

She covers mental illness.

For years now, policymakers have sought an explanation for the mental health crisis among young people. Suicide attempts and psychiatric hospitalizations were rising even before the pandemic. Then the rates of anxiety and depression doubled worldwide.

Why is this happening? The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt points to smartphones, and the algorithms that draw kids away from healthy play and into dangerous, addictive thought loops. No, his critics say. The real problem is a grim social landscape of school shootings, poverty and global warming. Or academic pressure. Or insufficient health care.

A group of researchers in Britain now propose another, at least partial, explanation: We talk about mental disorders so much. I cover this notion in a story The Times published today .

This hypothesis is called “prevalence inflation.” It holds that our society has become so saturated with discussion of mental health that young people may interpret mild, transient suffering as symptoms of a medical disorder.

This is a problem, they say, because identifying with a psychiatric diagnosis may not be helpful. Students who self-label as anxious or depressed are more likely than similar students who don’t self-label to view themselves as powerless over the disorder, recent studies have shown. They may respond by avoiding stressful situations like parties or public speaking, which could make their problems worse.

One of the psychologists behind the prevalence inflation theory, Lucy Foulkes of the University of Oxford, traces her skepticism back to 2018, when she began teaching undergraduates. They were “bombarded” with messages warning that they might be in crisis, she said. “It seemed like the more we were trying to raise awareness about it, it wasn’t getting better, and in fact, it only seemed to be getting worse.”

She grew critical of curricula that teach children to recognize and manage their emotions, sometimes referred to as social emotional learning. Schools have introduced an array of programs, teaching children the basics of techniques like mindfulness and cognitive behavioral therapy, which have proved beneficial in adults.

Several recent studies have found lackluster or negative effects for students who received trainings, especially those who started out with more severe symptoms. That evidence has done little to dampen their popularity, Foulkes said.

An urgent need

Many experts in the field of adolescent mental health defend awareness campaigns and school-based trainings. “Especially with teens, we need more universal interventions, not less,” said Zachary Blumkin, a child psychologist at Columbia University Irving Medical Center.

The main reason, they say, is that traditional, one-on-one therapy and psychiatric care is not easily available. Teenagers in crisis can wait months to see a clinician. They often land in emergency rooms as a last resort.

For that reason, the field has gravitated toward preventive models. These teach all students — not just the troubled ones — to manage distressing emotions. A 2023 meta-analysis of 252 such programs concluded that, generally, children benefit from them. There is also promise in a more tailored approach , one that lets schools focus on kids with the most acute needs.

Some experts also disagree that over-diagnosis is a problem.

Andrew Gerber, a child psychiatrist, says we should think of mental illness as a spectrum: Disorders like anxiety or depression occur in a bell curve distribution, so they’re more like hypertension than appendicitis. And like hypertension, he said, they’re worth treating early in their progression, with medication and therapy. “Anyone who tries to define a sharp line between ‘real’ illness and what is not real, no matter where they put the line, is doomed to get it wrong and do damage in the process,” said Gerber, the president and medical director at Silver Hill Hospital in New Canaan, Conn.

Foulkes disagrees. Even when we have good treatments, we’re bad at identifying whose disorder is likely to deteriorate, she said. And some children struggle because something is wrong at home, like domestic abuse or poverty or bullying. Mindfulness trainings are unlikely to help these kids.

“A lot of the time, what’s causing the problem is not something that’s going to improve with medication or therapy,” she said. “You’re running the risk of just telling people they have a problem without helping alleviate it.”

A generation is growing up fluent in the language of mental health, something that will benefit teens who badly need treatment. But others may apply medical diagnoses to the painful, normal adversity of growing up.

The “prevalence inflation” hypothesis asks us to keep an eye on those excesses. People hurt after breakups and struggle to adjust to new schools; negative feelings aren’t always a sign of mental illness. They can even teach us resilience.

Rates of mental health disorders are rising among American adolescents. Read one 13-year-old’s story .

There aren’t always enough resources to support teenagers’ mental health. As schools search for solutions, some student-led clubs step in .

Are smartphones driving teenagers to depression? It’s complicated , writes David Wallace-Wells in Times Opinion.

THE LATEST NEWS

Israel-hamas war.

The Israeli military said it was asking tens of thousands of Gazans sheltering in eastern Rafah to temporarily evacuate to what it described as a humanitarian zone.

Hamas claimed responsibility for a rocket attack that Israeli officials said killed three soldiers and left three more critically wounded.

Israel moved to shut down local operations of Al Jazeera , a Qatar-based news outlet.

Cease-fire talks between Israel and Hamas are at an impasse. The main obstacle is the duration of a pause.

Four children from Gaza arrived in the U.S. to receive urgent medical treatment . They were greeted at Kennedy Airport with toys and balloons.

Campus Protests

U.C.L.A. said that it would resume in-person classes today and that it had created a new campus security office .

New York Magazine and the Columbia student newspaper surveyed the campus about the protests . More than 60 percent of respondents said they had views on the conflict they avoided saying publicly.

More college professors — many of whom came of age during the era of Vietnam War protests — are joining student demonstrations , The Wall Street Journal reports.

More International News

Around Shanghai, women gather in bars and bookstores to debate their place in a country ruled by men.

Panamanians elected José Raúl Mulino, a former public security minister, as their next president .

Paris committed to making the Olympics more accessible for people with disabilities. Advocacy groups are concerned that the city remains unprepared .

In the 19th century, Belgian troops decapitated a Congolese leader and took his skull as a trophy. The leader’s descendants are struggling to have his remains returned .

Kim Godwin, the first Black woman to run a broadcast news division, said she would step down as president of ABC News after a tumultuous tenure.

Sony and the private equity firm Apollo are in talks to acquire Paramount .

MORNING READS

Community: For generations of immigrants, Sunday soccer in a park in Queens is more than a game .

Health: Ultraprocessed foods are linked to poor health. But what are they exactly?

Loneliness: Social connection experts offer advice on cultivating a sense of belonging .

Ask Vanessa: “How do I know if my untucked shirt is too long?”

Kocktails: As nonalcoholic cocktails become a staple on American menus, some children have begun to partake .

Metropolitan Diary: A necklace rescue in Midtown .

Lives Lived: Bernard Hill was a British actor who incarnated humble masculine leadership as Capt. Edward J. Smith in “Titanic” and as Théoden, the king of Rohan, in two “Lord of the Rings” films. He died at 79 .

Formula One: McLaren’s Lando Norris secured his first victory at the Miami Grand Prix .

No punches pulled: At a live Netflix comedy roast, former Patriots players and Kevin Hart among others roasted Tom Brady about his divorce and Deflategate.

N.H.L.: The Dallas Stars eliminated the defending Stanley Cup champion Las Vegas Golden Knights in a thrilling 2-1 Game 7 win .

N.B.A.: Donovan Mitchell’s 24 second-half points led the Cleveland Cavaliers to a comeback win in their own Game 7 against the Orlando Magic.

ARTS AND IDEAS

The artist Frank Stella, who helped usher in the Minimalist movement of the 1960s, died on Saturday at 87. His career began during the Eisenhower era, when artistic tendencies — much like ideas about gender and sexuality — fell into fixed categories: one was either a figurative artist or an abstract one. Things changed, the critic Deborah Solomon writes, but Stella did not. “He never stopped insisting on the inherent superiority of abstract painting,” she adds. Read her full appraisal of Stella .

More on culture

Madonna ended her retrospective Celebration Tour with a free show in Rio de Janeiro, which was attended by an estimated 1.6 million people .

Trying to find your own song of the summer? Vulture has published a bracket to sort through this year’s pop deluge.

The HBO series “The Sympathizer” is a rebuttal to a Hollywood staple. It is its own Vietnam War movie and a detailed work of film criticism , James Poniewozik writes.

Over the weekend, “The Fall Guy,” starring Ryan Gosling, earned only $28.5 million . It is Hollywood’s lowest start to the summer box office season since 1995.

THE MORNING RECOMMENDS …

Make Dolester Miles’s famous coconut pecan cake .

Watch the Met Gala red carpet tonight.

Stargaze with a telescope for beginners .

Clear your phone’s camera roll .

Take our news quiz .

Here is today’s Spelling Bee . Yesterday’s pangram was maypole .

And here are today’s Mini Crossword , Wordle , Sudoku , Connections and Strands .

Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow.

Correction: Yesterday’s newsletter named two different Kentucky Derby winners. The winner was Mystik Dan, not Sierra Leone.

Ellen Barry is a reporter covering mental health for The Times. More about Ellen Barry

Exclusive: Corporate climate watchdog document deems carbon offsets largely ineffective

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Waste management firm WM is exploring a sale of its renewable natural gas business that could be worth about $3 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.

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Overnight rain helped firefighters stall a large wildfire near the Canadian oil sands city of Fort McMurray, Alberta, and wet weather on Thursday was expected to further aid containment efforts, local officials said.

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Short seller Muddy Waters Capital said on Thursday that none of its newly proposed directors for Canadian miner Mayfair Gold's board will receive any remuneration, in contrast to what it called the "inappropriate compensation" earned by the company's existing directors.

Dump trucks haul coal and sediment at the Black Butte coal mine outside Rock Springs, Wyoming, U.S.

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COMMENTS

What Is New Criticism?
An Excerpt from New Criticism Scholarship. Read the following excerpt from the article "Criticism, Inc." by John Crowe Ransom before proceeding with this chapter:. Criticism must become more scientific, or precise and systematic, and this means that it must be developed by the collective and sustained effort of learned persons—which means that its proper seat is in the universities.
New Criticism
New Criticism is a movement in 20th-century literary criticism that arose in reaction to those traditional "extrinsic" approaches that saw a text as making a moral or philosophical statement or as an outcome of social, economic, political, historical, or biographical phenomena. New Criticism holds that a text must be evaluated apart from its context; failure…
The New Criticism
Abstract. The New Criticism was extraordinarily influential from the end of the 1930s on into the 1950s. It is widely considered to have revolutionized the teaching of literature, to have helped in the definition of English Studies, and to have been a crucial starting-point for the development of critical theory in the second half of the twentieth century.
The Philosophical Self-Consciousness of the New Criticism ...
New Criticism and formalism grew out of an attempt to render literary criticism more "scientific," that is, to make criticism appear more measurable and thus a tool to analyse literary language through its form rather than its content as had been the critical and philosophical bent of the romantics. The organic/imaginative preference of both the Frühromantiker in Germany and the English ...
British and American New Criticism
Summary. New Criticism is the theory and practice of close reading—the intensive study of literature as literature, the interpretation of tone, structure, imagery, and metaphor, the analysis of the meanings and implications of the words on the page. It emerged in Great Britain in the 1920s and in the United States in the 1930s, and it gained ...
(PDF) Rereading the New Criticism
Academia.edu is a platform for academics to share research papers. Rereading the New Criticism ... New criticism first started as movement replacing the bio-critical and historical methods that dominated literary studies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In these methods instead of the text itself, the biographical-historical ...
The technology of interpretation: new approaches to the new criticism
25 Containers 10.1-10.2 'Handwritten Draft with Revisions 1983-1984. J.M Coetzee Papers. Harry Ransom Center Steven and Clara Summers papers. Virginia Kelly Karnes Archives and Special Collections Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX. 26 June 2012. Handwritten note by Coetzee from December 19, 1983.
PDF ISSN Online: New criticism
The aim of this research paper is to describe the history, emergence, historical background, purpose, decadence and writers of New Criticism in world literature also the rules, commonalities and principles that are common among New Critics (Followers of school of New Criticism) and also we had shed
What Was New Criticism?
The New Critics, it. charged, had trivialized literature and literary study by turning critical interpretation into an overintellectualized game whose was the solution of interpretive puzzles. This way of viewing ature tended to ignore or destroy the moral, political, and personal. impact that literature might possess.
Affect Theory and Literary Criticism
SUBMIT PAPER. Emotion Review. Impact Factor: 5.4 / 5-Year Impact Factor: 7.9 . JOURNAL HOMEPAGE. SUBMIT PAPER. ... it also seeks to identify emerging new directions in research. Introduction. ... the methods of New Criticism that had reigned from the 1940s through the 1960s, and ruled as out of court any discussion of affective effects). So the ...
New Criticism
New Criticism was a formalist movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object.The movement derived its name from John Crowe Ransom's 1941 book The New Criticism.
Practicing New Criticism
Instructions. Step One: At the end of each section in Critical Worlds, you will find a chapter called "Practicing [Theoretical Approach]." (For example, "Practicing New Criticism") Read all the works in this section and be prepared to discuss them on our class discussion board or in class. Step Two: Choose one of the works to write ...
Literary Herald Approaching a Critical Perspective: A Study of New
New criticism is a school of thought that analyz es any piece of literary work by ... the similarities and some differences in favor of Satan would be discussed in this scholarly research paper.
(PDF) A NOTE ON THE NEW CRITICISM
A NOTE ON THE NEW CRITICISM. One of the most influential movements in modern critical scholarship, the New Criticism is a philosophy of literary interpretation that stresses the importance of studying literary texts as complete works of art in themselves. Although the term New Criticism was first coined in the nineteenth century, it was not ...
(PDF) New criticism
The aim of this research paper is to describe the history, emergence, historical background, purpose, decadence and writers of New Criticism in world literature also the rules, commonalities and principles that are common among New Critics (Followers of school of New Criticism) and also we had shed lights on the purpose of New Criticism in poetry and prose, and the development, elevation and ...
(PDF) New Criticism
Dr. NASREEN BANU JAMADAR. One of the most influential movements in modern critical scholarship, the New Criticism is a philosophy of literary interpretation that stresses the importance of studying literary texts as complete works of art in themselves. Although the term New Criticism was first coined in the nineteenth century, it was not until ...
New Criticism
New Criticism, post-World War I school of Anglo-American literary critical theory that insisted on the intrinsic value of a work of art and focused attention on the individual work alone as an independent unit of meaning. It was opposed to the critical practice of bringing historical or biographical data to bear on the interpretation of a work. The primary technique employed in the New ...
PDF The Role of New Criticism in Literary Criticism
John Crowe Ransom published his book New Criticism and later title of his book became a very popular method of analyzing the literature. Index Terms - Historical, criticism analysis. I. INTRODUCTION Objective of article: The research paper aims to reveal out the fact that new criticism is a scientific and technical way of judging the literary ...
Russian Formalism and New Criticism
Russian Formalism and New Criticism is a research method, a type of textual research, that literary critics use to interpret textsa genre of discourse employed by literary critics used to share the results of their interpretive efforts. Key Terms: Dialectic; Hermeneutics; Semiotics; Text & Intertextuality; Tone Foundational Questions of Russian Formalism and New Criticism How
The Influence of New Criticism on Western Literary Theory and Criticism
New Criticism has formed the lasting impact and caused the enormous response in western literary theory and criticism.Concerning on the developing period of contemporary western literary theories,it is evident that some complicated relevance,such as similarity and differences,have been exiting between New Criticism and other schools of literary theory and criticism after it in many ways,and ...
Russian Formalism & New Criticism: Understanding the Outlines
Russian Formalism and New Criticism are two major important theories. Both of the theories have contributed a lot towards well understanding of a text. The former started in Russia whereas the latter started in America. Russian Formalism debunks the content and context of a text and emphasizes form whereas New Criticism focuses on the close reading of a text. The present paper is an attempt to ...
PDF PAPER XVI UNIT I NEW CRITICISM 1.0. Introduction
PAPER XVI UNIT I NEW CRITICISM 1.0. Introduction: The New Criticism was a formalist movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic ...
Learning critical feminist research: A brief introduction to feminist
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US funders to tighten oversight of controversial 'gain of function' research. New policy on high-risk biology studies aims to address criticism that previous rules were too vague. By. Max ...
PDF Topic 8: How to critique a research paper 1
1. Use these guidelines to critique your selected research article to be included in your research proposal. You do not need to address all the questions indicated in this guideline, and only include the questions that apply. 2. Prepare your report as a paper with appropriate headings and use APA format 5th edition.
Literary Criticism Research
The first step is to read the literary work you are analyzing. Your thoughts and reactions as a reader will be key to your paper. The next step is to find outside information that will help you understand the work. This information can help you make sense of the literature you are reading, and contribute to a more informed analysis. This guide ...
Welcome to the Purdue Online Writing Lab
Mission. The Purdue On-Campus Writing Lab and Purdue Online Writing Lab assist clients in their development as writers—no matter what their skill level—with on-campus consultations, online participation, and community engagement. The Purdue Writing Lab serves the Purdue, West Lafayette, campus and coordinates with local literacy initiatives.
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A Fresh Approach to a Crisis
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12 The New Criticism

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The Philosophical Self-Consciousness of the New Criticism and Formalism

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9 Practicing New Criticism

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“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot (1915)

2. The Parable of the Prodigal Son (c. 90 CE) King James Version

3. “Recuerdo” by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1922)

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