What are post- colonial study, Diaspora and New criticism?

Name: Dhruvi chavda
Roll no:6
Assignment:What are post- colonial study, Diaspora and New criticism?

What is Post- colonial Study: -

Postcolonial (sometimes post-colonial) studies are a way of analyzing literature with a focus on the effects of European and American colonization. The postcolonial period dates from 1957 to today. Many African countries achieved formal independence during the 1960’s.
 

In this post-colonial period, the majority of African states operate under some form of Presidential rule. Only a few of the states were able to maintain democratic governments permanently.

Postcolonial literature is a body of literary writing that responds to the intellectual discourse of European colonization in Asia, Africa, Middle East, the Pacific and elsewhere. Postcolonial literature addresses the problems and consequences of the decolonization of a country and of a nation, especially the political and cultural independence of formerly subjugated colonial peoples; it also covers literary critiques of and about postcolonial literature, the undertones of which carry, communicate, and justify racialism and colonialism. But most contemporary forms of postcolonial literature present literary and intellectual critiques of the postcolonial discourse by endeavoring to assimilate post colonialism and its literary expressions.

Post-colonial literally means after colonization. So, in context, a post-colonial fairytale/myth is anything that originated with the Western peoples that colonized the United States. This era was characterized by strive for the American literary identity. Post colonial refers to a historical phase undergone by Third World countries after the decline of colonialism.

At the first glance post colonial studies would seem to be a matter of history and political science, rather than literary criticism. However, we must remember that English as in “English Department” or “English Literature” has been since the age of the British Empire a global language. Postcolonial literary theorists study the English language within this politicized context, especially those writings that developed at the colonial “front” such as works by Rudyard Kipling, E.M foster, Jean Rhys, or Jamaica Kincaid.

Said’s concept of orientalism was an important touchstone to postcolonial Studies, as he described the stereotypical discourse about the East as constructed by the West. This discourse rather than realistically portraying Eastern “Others”, construct them based upon Western anxieties and preoccupations. Said sharply critiques the western images of the oriental as ‘irrational, depraved (fallen), child-like, ‘different’, “which has allowed the west to define itself as “rational, virtuous, mature, ‘normal’ ”.

Homi K. Bhabha’s postcolonial theory involves analysis of nationality, ethnicity, and politics with poststructuralist ideas of identity and indeterminacy, defining postcolonial identities as shifting, hybrid constructions. Bhabha critiques the presumed dichotomies between center and periphery, colonized and colonizer, self and other, borrowing from deconstruction the argument that these are false binaries.

Post colonial critics accordingly study diasporic texts outside the usual Western genres, especially productions by aboriginal authors, marginalized ethnicities, immigrants, and refugees. Post colonial literature from immerging nations by such writers as Chinua Achebe and Salman Rushdie are read alongside European responses to colonialism by writers such as George Orwell and Albert Camus. We can see some powerful conflicts arising from the colonial past in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, for example, which deconstructs from a postcolonial viewpoint the history of modern India.

Among the most important figures in post colonial feminism is Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who examines the effects of political independence upon “subaltern” or subprolrtarian women in the Third world. Spivak’s subaltern studies reveal how female subjects are silenced by the dialogue between the male- dominated west and the male- dominated east, offering little hope for the subaltern women’s voice to rise up amidst the global social institutions that oppress her.

New criticism:-

New Criticism was a formalist movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the a 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. The work of English scholar I. A. Richards, especially his Practical Criticism and The Meaning of Meaning, which offered what was claimed to be an empirical scientific approach, were important to the development of New Critical methodology.  Also very influential were the critical essays of T. S. Eliot, such as "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and "Hamlet and His Problems", in which Eliot developed his notion of the "objective correlative". Eliot's evaluative judgments, such as his condemnation of Milton and Shelley, his liking for the so-called metaphysical poets and his insistence that poetry must be impersonal, greatly influenced the formation of the New Critical canon. New Criticism developed as a reaction to the older philological and literary history schools of the US North, which, influenced by nineteenth-century German scholarship, focused on the history and meaning of individual words and their relation to foreign and ancient languages, comparative sources, and the biographical circumstances of the authors. These approaches, it was felt, tended to distract from the text and meaning of a poem and entirely neglect its aesthetic qualities in favor of teaching about external factors. On the other hand, the literary appreciation school, which limited itself to pointing out the "beauties" and morally elevating qualities of the text, was disparaged by the New Critics as too subjective and emotional. Condemning this as a version of Romanticism, they aimed for newer, systematic and objective method. It was frequently alleged that the New Criticism treated literary texts as autonomous and divorced from historical context, and that its practitioners were “uninterested in the human meaning, the social function and effect of literature.” 

Indicative of the reader-response school of theory, Terence Hawke writes that the fundamental close reading technique is based on the assumption that “the subject and the object of study—the reader and the text—are stable and independent forms, rather than products of the unconscious process of signification," an assumption which he identifies as the "ideology of liberal humanism,” which is attributed to the New Critics who are “accused of attempting to disguise the interests at work in their critical processes.” For Hawkes, ideally, a critic ought to be considered to “[create] the finished work by his reading of it, and [not to] remain simply an inert consumer of a ‘ready-made’ product.”

In response to critics like Hawkes, Cleanth Brooks, in his essay "The New Criticism" (1979), argued that the New Criticism was not diametrically opposed to the general principles of reader-response theory and that the two could complement one another. For instance, he stated, "If some of the New Critics have preferred to stress the writing rather than the writer, so have they given less stress to the reader—to the reader's response to the work. Yet no one in his right mind could forget the reader. He is essential for 'realizing' any poem or novel. Reader response is certainly worth studying." However, Brooks tempers his praise for the reader-response theory by noting its limitations, pointing out that, "to put meaning and valuation of a literary work at the mercy of any and every individual [reader] would reduce the study of literature to reader psychology and to the history of taste."

New Criticism emphasizes explication, or "close reading," of "the work itself." It rejects old historicism's attention to biographical and sociological matters. Instead, the objective determination as to "how a piece works" can be found through close focus and analysis, rather than through extraneous and erudite special knowledge. It has long been the pervasive and standard approach to literature in college and high school curricula.
New Criticism, incorporating Formalism, examines the relationships between a text's ideas and its form, between what a text says and the way it says it. New Critics "may find tension, irony, or paradox in this relation, but they usually resolve it into unity and coherence of meaning" (Biddle 100). New Criticism attempts to be a science of literature, with a technical vocabulary, some of which we all had to teach in junior high school English classes (third-person, denouement, etc.). Working with patterns of sound, imagery, narrative structure, point of view, and other techniques discernible on close reading of the text, they seek to determine the function and appropriateness of these to the self-contained work.
New Critics, especially American ones in the 1940s and 1950s, attacked the standard notion of "expressive realism," the romantic fallacy that literature is the efflux of a noble soul, that for example love pours out onto the page in 14 iambic pentameter lines rhyming ABABCD etc. The goal then is not the pursuit of sincerity or authenticity, but subtlety, unity, and integrity--and these are properties of the text, not the author. The work is not the author's; it was detached at birth. The author's intentions are "neither available nor desirable" (nor even to be taken at face value when supposedly found in direct statements by authors). Meaning exists on the page. Thus, New Critics insist that the meaning of a text is intrinsic and should not be confused with the author's intentions nor the work's affective dimension (its impressionistic effects on the reader). The "intentional fallacy" is when one confuses the meaning of a work with the author's purported intention (expressed in letters, diaries, interviews, for example). The "affective fallacy" is the erroneous practice of interpreting texts according to the psychological or emotional responses of readers, confusing the text with its results.

Diaspora: - Diaspora Literature involves an idea of a homeland, a place from where the displacement occurs and narratives of harsh journeys undertaken on account of economic compulsions. Basically Diaspora is a minority community living in exile. The Oxford English Dictionary 1989 Edition (second) traces the etymology of the word 'Diaspora' back to its Greek root and to its appearance in the Old Testament as such it references.

However, the 1993 Edition of Shorter Oxford's definition of Diaspora can be found. While still insisting on capitalization of the first letter, 'Diaspora' now also refers to 'anybody of people living outside their traditional homeland.

In the tradition of indo-Christian the fall of Satan from the heaven and humankind's separation from the Garden of Eden, metaphorically the separation from God constitute diasporic situations. Etymologically, 'Diaspora' with its connotative political weight is drawn from Greek meaning to disperse and signifies a voluntary or forcible movement of the people from the homeland into new Under Colonialism, 'Diaspora' is a multifarious movement which involves-

The temporary or permanent movement of Europeans all over the world, leading to Colonial settlement. Consequent’s, consequently the ensuing economic exploitation of the settled areas necessitated large amount of labor that could not be fulfilled by local populace. This leads to: 
The Diaspora resulting from the enslavement of Africans and their relocation to places like the British colonies. After slavery was out lowed the continued demand for workers created indenturement labor. This produces: 
Large bodies of the people from poor areas of India, China and other to the West Indies, Malaya Fiji. Eastern and Southern Africa, etc. regions." Indian Diaspora can be classified into two kinds:

1. Forced Migration to Africa, Fiji or the Caribbean on account of slavery or indentured labor in the 18th or 19th century.

2.Voluntary Migration to U.S.A., U.K., Germany, France or other European countries for the sake of professional or academic purposes.

 The diasporian authors engage in cultural transmission that is equitably exchanged in the manner of translating a map of reality for multiple readerships. Diasporic writings are to some extent about the business of finding new Angles to enter reality; the distance, geographical and cultural enables new structures of feeling.