Irony Of The New Criticism And Its Modern Myth

Irony is one of the essential concepts in the New Criticism. The New Criticism's theoretical interpretation of Irony leads to the pursuit of some mythic statements. This dissertation focuses on the mechanisms of the meaning in the New Criticism's Irony. Firstly, it discusses the generative mechanism. Many aspects of different levels and qualities are oppositely juxtaposed in a text, and the meaning turns into its opposite because of the pressure of the context and thus a new meaning will be produced. Through observing the generative mechanism of the meaning in the framework of ontology, we can obtain a spatial effect this mechanism is eager to realize. The pursuit of the simultaneity excludes time and history, cause and effect, and ultimately moves toward the Myth.Secondly, this dissertation explains the inclusive mechanism of the meaning. The opposite meanings are unified by imagination and held in an entity. Through analyzing the inclusive mechanism of the meaning in the framework of unification of sensibility, we can find that this mechanism emphasizes the complexity of text in pursuit of a state of maximum consciousness, which brings about that poetry's emphasis on truth instead of beauty. There is a sort of metaphysical world view behind the unification of meaning. It makes the New Critics fall in with an identity thinking, which engenders that the new criticism's cognition of irony is enslaved even to the esthetics of symbolism in the romantic period.Thirdly, this dissertation probes the structural mechanism of the meaning. The process of the various generative meaning's dynamic transformation produces many new meanings that oppose each other but also complement each other. All kinds of meanings integrate the meaning of a poem, in another word, the poem's theatrical structure. Through recognizing the structural mechanism of the meaning in the framework of literature as knowledge, we can learn that this mechanism avers a special mimesis theory. Poetry turns to objective experience relying on the mimesis of the absolute experience. The New Criticism's Irony insists the transmission of experience, and at the same time objects to the interpretation for poetry. Thus such an assumption is implied in the doctrine of New Criticism: language is transparent enough to convey accurately any experience.Finally this dissertation attempts to explore the ideological nature of the New Criticism's Irony. For New Criticism, its conservative nature as well as the pursuit of Myth is permeated inits poetic construction which bears both ideological and utopian qualities.