A Dual Principle: Tension and/or Unity from New Criticism to Deconstruction

A Dual Principle: Tension and/or Unity from New Criticism to Deconstruction

Along with Darwin's evolution theory and Nietzsche's atheism, there has arisen a new intellectual movement demanding scientific rigor and new belief foundation in the Western world since the beginning of the twentieth century. As a result, a new critical approach to the works of art, New Criticism, has been developed in the sprit of pragmatism, and played a leading role III formulating a peculiar American sensibility in America. Originally New Criticism was evolved in the Continent by T. E. Hulme and T. S. Eliot attacking the British romanticism of the previous era, but has been established by American New Critics like Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren as dominant scholarship distinct from the long humanistic tradition of the Continent. Thus as a dominant theory of literary criticism of the early twentieth century, New Criticism shows the continuity and discontinuity of the literary tradition over two Continents and extends the double-edged relation to the deconstructive literary criticism of the later phase of history. Looking diachronically into their relations, New Criticism and deconstruction share a significant common ground on which such antiprojects as interests in language and the preference of textual structure ae fully explored in spite of their different tracks of development. Unity and tension are the most distinctive critical qualities working as the key underlying principles to the both criticisms. Unity and tension has been looked for to attain the higher level of artistic achievement since Aristotle and fully flowered into solid standards indispensable to evaluate literary works. Despite its never ceasing disrupting and fragmenting endeavor, deconstruction cannot give up the attempt to repeat the endless futile efforts to capture the never touchable presence and meaning of a literary text. Difference in Derrida was introduced to explicate the whole process of the impossibility of everpresent referentiality, but in the process, it has become a form to let the whole system of Derridean de constructive theory possible and sustainable. Thus it is also, unknowingly, assumed to bring out the consistency and uniformity of deconstruction. Unity and tension as dual principles are regarded as essential critical qualities to be focused in the analysis of literary works over the two Continents, over the whole period of the twentieth century.