The origin of New criticism is rather complex and apparently contradictory – especially in its theoretical and critical positions and practices. It is in sharp reaction to sociological or Marxian criticism which regarded literature as a product of society. It stressed on textual criticism. It is just like establishing a new professional criticism. The influence of Mathew Arnold’s concept of ‘poetry and culture’ is clearly perceptible in them. The New Criticism were also influenced by modernist poets/ critics like T.S Eliot and T.E Hulme, whose poetry and criticism emphasized the importance of the internal dynamics of poetic form.

At the foundations of the New Criticism was the idea of the critic as a kind of technician, whose specialized knowledge and skills enabled a form of close reading of literary texts that found meaning and value in form. The New Criticism flourished from the 1920s through the 1950s and was primarily concerned with poetry and poetic form. Though one can trace the origin of it back to a lecture – ‘The New Criticism’ delivered by Elias Spingarn in 1920, the term ‘New Criticism’ is used to refer to the theory and practice that was prominent in the American Literary Criticism until late 1960.

The term is coined after the John Crowe Ransom’s the most influential work “The New Criticism” in 1941. It is less a coherent literary theory than the critical and theoretical approaches all of which are grounded on the idea that the literary work is autonomous; and its unity and meaning are constituted primarily by formal and rhetorical features that take precedence over social, political and biographical contexts. Unlike historical criticism or biological criticism, New Criticism completely concerns with the text itself- with its language and organization with ontological discussion, It warms the reader against the critical practices which diverts attention from the text itself.

The distinctive practice of new critics is ‘close reading’- a detailed and subtle analysis of complex interrelations and ambiguities of the inherent elements of the literary work. It studies how the parts of the text relate with each other, how it contains and revolves ‘irony’, ‘paradox’, ‘tension’, and ‘ambiguities’. Their emphasis is on the organic unity of overall structure and verbal meaning. The conceive literary work as being a literary construct. They think about figures of speech, symbols, imagery, meaning with text. For them, the essential components of literary work are symbols, images, words rather than plot, character, theme and thought.

They tried to displace content of literary analysis and treat the work’s form and its content. Form was treated as self contained and autonomous entity deserving all critical attention. For them, the literary art is a complete entity in itself and the function of the critic is to analyze, interpret and evaluate the work of art, And his function should be unbiased with focus only on the text itself. The study of words, their arrangements, the way in which they act and react on each other is all important. Words, besides their literal meaning and significance, also have emotional, associative, symbolic significance; and only close reading and analysis can bring out their total meaning.

Unlike, the Reader Response Theory, their merit of the work is to be found in its language and structure. They view literary work as a self-sufficient, autonomous object whose failure and success, charms or lack of it are to be found in the work itself. The text is more important than reader and writer. New Criticism emphasizes on the complex interplay within a text.

Gardening is a delightful pastime. One can grow vegetables, fruits and flowers bin one’s own garden. If you do not have open spaces near your home for maintaining a garden you can set up a garden on your roof! All you need are a few old buckets or tubs, some mud and seeds to plant. Did you know? The horticulture society of Tamil Nadu gives soil bags with seeds to promote gardening in our houses! Stamp collection is nothing but collection stamps from envelops that come by mail. This hobby is known as philately. We learn about different leaders , important days on seeing the stamps ! We can also exchange rare stamps with our friends. Many people are fascinated to collect coins from different countries. Sometime relatives who visit or work in other countries bring and give the coins of the foreign country to us ! This hobby is known as numismatics. Some other take interest to collect seashells. It is said that there are more than 1,00,000 shell species found in the sea shores. The rarest, the most valuable, and the most beautiful shells are found in the Indo-Pacific , Caribbean, and Mediterranean regions. Cooking is one of the oldest hobbies. It is now even considered a life -skill to know how to cook. We all should try and learn to cook! Painting can help unleash your creative side. Painting allows you to tap into the thoughts , desires, and feelings in your head and translate them into something beautiful. Painting relaxes our mind and helps focus better, so go ahead and pick up a paintbrush. Teaching is a fun and useful hobby. Teaching helps us understand what we have learned better. It also helps us to help other children. If we are good at teaching then, one day we can even become a good teacher! Web- browsing helps us collect information about the latest medical invention, the new technology for phones and news about society and country. It is an amazing hobby where we can learn about things that are thousands of kilometres away with just a few clicks ! We can also share all the wonderful information with our friends.

Sylvia Plath deals with multi-dimensional themes in her poetry but she has worked mainly with the theme of death and suicides. In all of Plath’s poetry the theme of death is very prominent. Plath’s work is heavily autobiographical which depicts her life and influenced her poetic sensibility. Three biographical facts should be taken into consideration in order to understand Plath’s poetry: premature death of her father, the separation from her husband Ted, Hughes and her suicide attempts- first unsuccessful at twenty-one and the final one on her thirtieth year.

Confessional poets like Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and John Berryman in their poetry glorified the personal and private, expressing their innermost secrets aloud for all to hear. They all died of self-inflicted deaths. When these confessional poets speaks of their breakdown and failures, they drew themselves deep into sorrow and despair, often resulting in thoughts of self-destruction, which formed the major theme of their poem. Plath in her poem ‘Lady Lazarus’ speaks of her previous suicide attempts and in ‘Daddy’ the memory of her father had to be shaken off to breathe freely.

The Tokyo Olympics 2020 was planned to commence on July 2020 but due to the Corona Virus Pandemic, it was postponed many times. After a long wait, the Olympics has finally begun today. But this huge delay has come with an unimaginable cost.

Tokyo is estimated to have spent over $70 million on bidding for the Olympics and an estimated $15.4 billion to build facilities to host it. The one-year delay due to Covid-19 is said to have added $3 billion in costs. The Olympics had been postponed for the first time in its 124 years of existence. Due to this, it would be very hard to turn a profit from the Olympics this time. For instance, ticket sales would contribute $800 million for the Tokyo organizing committee. But this much revenue from tickets is impossible, given that foreign spectators are banned, and domestic fans may be drastically limited in number, or even absent for a lot of events.

In 2019, Japan hosted 31.9 million foreign visitors, who spent approximately $44 billon. These numbers fell down 87% in 2020 to just 4.1 million. Olympics officials said last year that they will refund 600,000 tickets purchased by foreigners. Outsiders not being able to come to the Olympics also means that hotels in Tokyo, especially the ones built around the Olympic stadiums for their accommodation, will go to waste and suffer huge losses.

More than 60 Japanese companies together paid more than $3 billion to sponsor the Olympics. An additional $200 million was also raised due to the postponement. This amount does not include the sponsorship from big corporations like Toyota, Bridgestone, Panasonic, and Samsung.

To add to this misfortune, there could be a lot of participants from many countries who may have suffered from COVID in the last year and aren’t physically or mentally prepared to participate in the postponed Olympics. Many countries may have strict rules that allow limited participants to take part in the Games. On top of all this, if even one participant tests positive for COVID on arriving at the Olympics or their stay at Tokyo, it would cause major setback to the events.  

This much loss due to COVID-19 has indeed drastically affected the Japanese economy. Officials said that cancelling the Games altogether would be so much worse than postponing, which would have estimated to cost $16.5 billion. All this led everyone to think, does Olympics need to be this grand and expensive? Is it all that worth it? The 2016 Rio Summer Olympics cost $20 billion, and the 2014 Russian Winter Olympics cost $50 billion! Some experts say that the 2020 Tokyo Games might just be the last overbudget Olympics.

Pride is a month-long LGBTQ+ celebration protest and an act of political activism all over the world. Nearly every city in some country has some sort of big event- usually a large parade. 

Pride is dated back to the 1960s and was to commemorate the stonewall riots which occurred in June. Hence pride events are held during June to recognize the impact of the LGBTQ+ community. 

Straight pride is a slogan that arose in the late 1980s and early 1990s and has been used primarily by social conservation groups as a political statement or strategy. The term is described as a response to gay pride.

 The concept of pride originates as a movement that seeks to challenge the negative image of LGBT people being openly identified with a cultural stigmatized group; as such, it creates discomfort.

In this context, the terms straight pride and heterosexual pride exist as an argument criticizing gay pride as unnecessary, stating by contrast with heterosexuality that heterosexuals “don’t talk about straight pride”, don’t have “straight pride rallies”, and would be seen as ridiculous if they were to “band together and have a heterosexual pride.

This argument expresses the idea that showing pride for a homosexual orientation is equally absurd. Analysts of LGBT rights state as a counter-argument that mainstream culture offers many social events (weddings, baptism, family reunions and so on) for heterosexuals to express and celebrate their sexual orientation in public, while homosexuals usually feel isolated and parades offer them support and an opportunity for socializing.  

Examples of straight pride:

A typical example is that people from Boston (America) have decided to have a straight pride somewhere in August 2019.

Yellowknife, NWT (2005): In May 2005, the northern Canadian city of Yellowknife announced that it would mark both a gay and straight pride day.

Budapest, Hungary (2010): In 2010, a heterosexual pride march was held in Budapest.

Reasons why there shouldn’t be a straight pride: 

• Straight people don’t live with ‘heterophobia’ at schools, workplaces or places of business.
• Straight people don’t get murdered for being straight. 
• Straight people can travel anywhere in the world without the fear of being straight. 
• Straight people have always been able to legally marry. 
• Straight people have never been jailed for being heterosexual.
• Straight people aren’t called abominations for their sexual orientation.
• Straight people aren’t denied medical care for being heterosexual.
• Straight people aren’t told to ‘don’t ask or ‘don’t tell’ when signing up for the military or any job. 
• Straight people don’t have their sexual orientation used as an insult to describe anything negative. 

When people ask why straight pride isn’t celebrated or why gay pride is being celebrated it’s because of the reasons listed above. Also, it feels like they are saying contributions by LGBTQ+ – a minority group of people that face constant adversity are simply not worthy of recognition. Further, they are even denying the importance and significance of identifying as LGBTQ+ and achieving things.

Hence the entire concept of straight pride should be erased.