New Criticism (Josh)

The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald is a novel I feel can be looked at through a New Criticism lens and still have the authors original intentions be shown. Fitzgerald had such a focus on making each section of the story perfect, revising time after time again to make sure every aspect, whether structural or not, was perfect and flowed just as he intended. The Great Gatsby is a unique example though, it is truly a rare piece of American literature and as we have seen through out our exploration of the novel, viewing the book through different lenses, criticisms can be broadly applied to the text and almost always have some material to work with, which is impressive when the The Great Gatsby's relatively short 180 pages is taken into consideration.

Even when looking at texts that work well with New Criticism I cannot agree with the ideals behind New Criticism, simply ignoring other aspects of a text and suggesting that its main meaning should be determined through its structure and nots its content or context is ridiculous. Other criticisms such as Feminist for Marxist don't simply ignore parts of a text, they try to adapt those aspects of the text into something that can be seen as an argument for their cause. New criticism can be an important lens to use in combination with others to try to understand the complete meaning of a text but when used on its own I feel a complete understanding is impossible to gain.