Editing New Criticism (section)

==Formalism theory==
New Criticism developed as a reaction to the older philological and literary history schools of the US North, which 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, taking this approach under the influence of nineteenth-century German scholarship. The New Critics felt that this approach 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 New Critics disparaged the literary appreciation school, which limited itself to pointing out the "beauties" and morally elevating qualities of the text, as too subjective and emotional. Condemning this as a version of Romanticism, they aimed for a newer, systematic and objective method.<ref>For an overview, see Gerald Graff, Professing Literature, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987.</ref>

It was felt, especially by creative writers and by literary critics outside the academy, that the special aesthetic experience of poetry and literary language was lost in the welter of extraneous erudition and emotional effusions. Heather Dubrow notes that the prevailing focus of literary scholarship was on "the study of ethical values and philosophical issues through literature, the tracing of literary history, and ... political criticism". Literature was approached via its moral, historical and social background and literary scholarship did not focus on analysis of texts.<ref>Dubrow, Heather. "Twentieth Century Shakespeare Criticism." ''The Riverside Shakespeare'' 2nd ed. Houghton Mifflin, 1997: 35.</ref>

New Critics believed the structure and meaning of the text were intimately connected and should not be analyzed separately. In order to bring the focus of literary studies back to analysis of the texts, they aimed to exclude the reader's response, the author's intention, historical and cultural contexts, and moralistic bias from their analysis. These goals were articulated in Ransom's "Criticism, Inc." and [[Allen Tate]]'s "Miss Emily and the Bibliographer".

Close reading (or ''explication de texte'') was a staple of French literary studies, but in the United States, aesthetic concerns and the study of modern poets were the province of non-academic essayists and book reviewers rather than serious scholars. The New Criticism changed this. Though their interest in textual study initially met with resistance from older scholars, the methods of the New Critics rapidly predominated in American universities until challenged by [[feminist literary criticism]] and [[structuralism]] in the 1970s. Other schools of critical theory, including, [[post-structuralism]], and [[Deconstruction|deconstructionist theory]], the [[New Historicism]], and [[reception theory]] followed.

Although the New Critics were never a formal group, an important inspiration was the teaching of [[John Crowe Ransom]] of [[Kenyon College]], whose students (all Southerners), [[Allen Tate]], [[Cleanth Brooks]], and [[Robert Penn Warren]] would go on to develop the aesthetics that came to be known as the New Criticism. Indeed, for Paul Lauter, a Professor of American Studies at [[Trinity College (Connecticut)|Trinity College]], New Criticism is a reemergence of the [[Southern Agrarians]].<ref name="versionsofnashville">{{cite journal |first = Paul| last = Lauter| title="Versions of Nashville, Visions of American Studies": Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, October 27, 1994 |journal=American Quarterly |volume=47 |issue=2 |page=195 |jstor=2713279 | date = June 1995 | doi = 10.2307/2713279}}</ref> In his essay, "The New Criticism", Cleanth Brooks notes that "The New Critic, like the [[Snark (Lewis Carroll)|Snark]], is a very elusive beast", meaning that there was no clearly defined "New Critical" manifesto, school, or stance.<ref>Brooks, Cleanth. "The New Criticism." ''The Sewanee Review'' 87: 4 (1979): 592.</ref> Nevertheless, a number of writings outline inter-related New Critical ideas.

In 1946, [[W. K. Wimsatt|William K. Wimsatt]] and [[Monroe Beardsley]] published a classic and controversial New Critical essay entitled "[[Intentional Fallacy|The Intentional Fallacy]]", in which they argued strongly against the relevance of an [[Authorial intentionality|author's intention]], or "intended meaning" in the analysis of a literary work.  For Wimsatt and Beardsley, the words on the page were all that mattered; importation of meanings from outside the text was considered irrelevant, and potentially distracting.

In another essay, "[[Affective fallacy|The Affective Fallacy]]", which served as a kind of sister essay to "The Intentional Fallacy" Wimsatt and Beardsley also discounted the reader's personal/emotional reaction to a literary work as a valid means of analyzing a text. This fallacy would later be repudiated by theorists from the [[reader-response]] school of literary theory. One of the leading theorists from this school, [[Stanley Fish]], was himself trained by New Critics. Fish criticizes Wimsatt and Beardsley in his essay "Literature in the Reader" (1970).<ref>Leitch, Vincent B. , et al., eds. ''The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism''. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001.</ref>

The hey-day of the New Criticism in American high schools and colleges was the Cold War decades between 1950 and the mid-seventies. Brooks and Warren's ''[[Understanding Poetry]]'' and ''Understanding Fiction'' both became staples during this era.

Studying a passage of prose or poetry in New Critical style required careful, exacting scrutiny of the passage itself. Formal elements such as [[rhyme]], meter, [[setting (fiction)|setting]], [[characterization]], and plot were used to identify the [[theme (literature)|theme]] of the text. In addition to the theme, the New Critics also looked for [[paradox]], [[ambiguity]], [[irony]], and [[Suspense|tension]] to help establish the single best and most unified interpretation of the text.

Although the New Criticism is no longer a dominant theoretical model in American universities, some of its methods (like [[close reading]]) are still fundamental tools of literary criticism, underpinning a number of subsequent theoretic approaches to literature including poststructuralism, deconstruction theory, [[narrative criticism|New Testament narrative criticism]], and [[reader-response theory]]. It has been credited with anticipating the insights of the [[linguistic turn]] and for showing significant ideological and historical parallels with [[logical positivism]].<ref>{{Cite book| publisher = University of Chicago Press| isbn = 978-0-226-78665-0| last = Storm| first = Jason Josephson| title = Metamodernism: The Future of Theory| location = Chicago | pages=13–14 | date = 2021 | url = https://books.google.com/books?id=pEQ6EAAAQBAJ}}</ref>