Editing New Criticism

{{Short description|Formalist movement in literary theory}}
'''New Criticism''' was a [[Formalism (literature)|formalist]] movement in [[literary theory]] that dominated American [[literary criticism]] in the 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 works of [[University of Cambridge|Cambridge]] scholar [[I. A. Richards]], especially his  ''Practical Criticism'', ''The Principles of Literary Criticism'' and ''The Meaning of Meaning'', which offered what was claimed to be an empirical scientific approach, were important to the development of a New Critical methodology.<ref>Lynn, Steven. ''Texts and Contexts: Writing about Literature with Critical Theory''. Addison-Wesley, 2001.</ref> [[Cleanth Brooks]], [[John Crowe Ransom]], [[W. K. Wimsatt]], and [[Monroe Beardsley]] also made significant contributions to New Criticism. It was Wimsatt and Beardsley who introduced the ideas of [[Authorial intent|intentional fallacy]] and [[affective fallacy]]. Also very influential were the [[T. S. Eliot#Literary criticism|critical essays]] of [[T. S. Eliot]], such as "[[Tradition and the Individual Talent]]" and "[[Hamlet and His Problems]]", in which Eliot developed his notions of the "theory of impersonality" and "[[objective correlative]]" respectively. Eliot's evaluative judgments, such as his condemnation of [[John Milton]] and [[John Dryden]], 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.

==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>

==Criticism==
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."<ref name="Wellek">Wellek, René. "The New Criticism: Pro and Contra." ''Critical Inquiry'', Vol. 4, No. 4. (Summer, 1978), pp. 611–624. [https://www.jstor.org/stable/1342947].</ref><ref name="Jancovich">{{cite book |last=Jancovich |first=Mark |title=The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism |publisher=Cambridge University Press |location=Cambridge |year=1993 |isbn=0-521-41652-3}}</ref>

Indicative of the [[Reader-response criticism|reader-response school of theory]], Terence Hawkes 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."<ref name="Jancovich" /> 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."<ref name="Jancovich" />

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."<ref>Brooks, Cleanth. "The New Criticism." ''The Sewanee Review'' 87:4 (1979) 598.</ref>

Another objection against New Criticism is that it misguidedly tries to turn literary criticism into an objective science, or at least aims at "bringing literary study to a condition rivaling that of science." One example of this is Ransom's essay "Criticism, Inc.", in which he advocated that "criticism must become more scientific, or precise and systematic".<ref name="Wellek" /><ref>Ransom, John Crowe. "Criticism, Inc." ''[[The Virginia Quarterly Review]]'', Autumn 1937.</ref> [[René Wellek]], however, argued against this by noting that a number of the New Critics outlined their theoretical aesthetics in contrast to the "objectivity" of the sciences.

Wellek defended the New Critics in his essay "The New Criticism: Pro and Contra" (1978).

The New Criticism is not supported by feminist theory which is often concerned with sexual identity and the human body. Nor is it aligned  with post-colonial theory which deals with dual-identity, personal experience and political bias in writing.<ref>Pivato, Joseph. "Echo: Essays on Other Literatures." Toronto: Guernica, 1994, 2003.</ref>

==Important texts==
* Richards' books ''Principles of Literary Criticism'' and ''Practical Criticism''
* [[William Empson]]'s book ''[[Seven Types of Ambiguity]]''
* T.S. Eliot's essays "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and "Hamlet and His Problems"
* Ransom's essays "Criticism, Inc" and "The Ontological Critic"
* Tate's essay "Miss Emily and the Bibliographer"
* Wimsatt and Beardsley's essays "[[intentional fallacy|The Intentional Fallacy]]" and " [[affective fallacy|The Affective Fallacy]]"
* Brooks' book ''[[The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry]]''
* Warren's essay "Pure and Impure Poetry"
* Wellek and Warren's book ''Theory of Literature''

==References==
{{Reflist}}

==Sources==
{{Refbegin}}
* Searle, Leroy.  "New Criticism" in ''The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory'', 2nd edition.  Edited by Michael Groden, Martin Kreiswirth, and [[Imre Szeman]].  Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.  Available online in PDF from the University of Washington [https://web.archive.org/web/20080307122234/http://uwch-4.humanities.washington.edu/Texts/SEARLE/NEW%20CRITICISM-rev.pdf].
* Davis, Garrick. ''Praising It New''. Swallow, 2008. Anthology that includes some of the keys texts of the New Criticism.
{{Refend}}

==Further reading==
*Brooks, Cleanth. "Criticism and Literary History: Marvell's Horatian Ode". ''Sewanee Review'' 55 (1947): 199–222.
*Carton, Evan and Gerald Graff. ''The Cambridge History of American Literature volume 8: Poetry and Criticism (1940–1995)''. General Editor, Sacvan Bercovitch. New York; Cambridge, University Press, 1996. pp.&nbsp;261–471.
*Duvall, John N. "Eliot's Modemism and Brook's New Criticism: poetic and religious thinking". ''The Mississippi Quarterly'': 46 (1992): 23–38.
* Graff Gerald. ''Professing Literature''. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987.
* Lentricchia, Frank. "After the New Criticism". University of Chicago Press, 1980.
*Russo, John Paul. "The Tranquilized Poem: The Crisis of New Criticism in the 1950s." ''Texas Studies in Literature and Language'' 30 (1988): 198–227.
*Wellek, René. ''A History of Modern Criticism, 1750–1950.'' Volume 6: ''American Criticism, 1900–1950''. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.

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{{Southern Agrarians}}
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[[Category:New Criticism| ]]
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[[Category:20th-century American literature]]