New Criticism and The Great Gatsby

Discussion Board Assignment 4.1 and 4.2

New Criticism focuses fundamentally on the text itself and concentrates on “close reading.” No outside forces or shapers need to be examined. You do not need to know about the history of the author. In fact, New Critics had a term called intentional fallacy to say that the “author’s intention is [not] the same as the meaning of the text.” And affective fallacy does not let a reader’s feeling about the events of a text to interfere with the text itself.
The literary language is the meaning of the work, down to individual words. Changing one word changes the text. There is an organic unity to the text that makes every word play off each other. New Critics laud paradox, irony, and ambiguity in the words of a text. Context allows us to decipher the meaning of a symbol in a text.
Possibly the reason for its “extinction,” as the text by Tyson talks about the fact that this criticism has fallen out of favor, is the reading of a text under this philosophy does allow for outside influences. It is “intrinsic” and “objective.” However, there are many times when background is often necessary for crucial understanding. Langston Hughes poetry, as an example of my own, allows for further beauty and passion on the theme when you realize that he is an African-American author, even though the text of many of his poems leaves us no clues of this. New Critics try to find that “single best interpretation” of a work. However, longer works tended to hurt this theory.
The Great Gatsby has a Universal Theme and when analyzed by New Criticism, a reader can garner a time-capsule image of this theme during a time period of the 1920s. It is the American Dream.
Gatsby as a central character undertakes this theme almost solely. Tom Buchanan never had to work for his money and takes it for granted in the book, seeing the advancement of other races as a threat to his power. Gatsby personifies this American Dream in that he strove to reach it.
There are many parallels here. Gatsby plays the hard-working American with an idea and the guts to go for it. He writes down in his book a schedule that will have him achieve a higher status from his petty beginnings. He works for it, as if the money and status were the only things important, as most Americans have been taught. He throws parties not because he likes them but because he wants others to like him and push him up the social ladder by default. If the rich and famous go to his parties, then he must be rich and famous.
Perhaps the most striking symbol of this American Dream, seen only from the text, is the green light across the bay. This does not represent Daisy; it represents the dream of Daisy. There’s the light, right across the bay. So go and get it—what’s stopping you? There’s the American Dream, son—work hard and it will all be yours. However, as the novel proves, the green light is not Daisy, because once Gatsby has it, it is not everything he thought he desired.