New Criticism

New Criticism
Name	New Criticism
Region	United States, United Kingdom
Era	Early to mid-20th century
Notable ideas	Close reading, intentional fallacy, affective fallacy, heresy of paraphrase, textual autonomy

New Criticism. New Criticism was a dominant formalist movement in Anglophone literary criticism of the mid-20th century. It emphasized the intrinsic study of a text as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object, largely independent of historical context or authorial intent. The movement advocated for a rigorous, analytical method known as close reading to uncover the complex unity and irony within a literary work. Its principles fundamentally shaped the teaching of literature in American universities for several decades.

Origins and historical context

New Criticism arose in the early 20th century as a reaction against the prevailing biographical and historical scholarship of the previous century, often practiced by scholars at institutions like Harvard University. It was influenced by the critical essays of T.S. Eliot, particularly his ideas on impersonality in art and the objective correlative. The movement also drew from the practical criticism of I.A. Richards, whose work at Cambridge University with texts like *Practical Criticism* focused on the psychological effects of poetry. The socio-political turmoil surrounding events like World War I and the Great Depression contributed to a desire for stable, objective analytical methods. The movement found an institutional home in the American South, particularly through the work of the Fugitives group at Vanderbilt University.

Key principles and concepts

Central to its doctrine was the concept of the autonomous text, a complete and independent artifact whose meaning resided solely within its linguistic structure. New Critics famously identified two interpretive errors: the intentional fallacy, which conflates a work's meaning with the author's stated purpose, and the affective fallacy, which judges a work by its emotional effect on the reader. They also warned against the heresy of paraphrase, arguing that a poem's true meaning could not be reduced to a simple summary. Instead, they valued ambiguity, paradox, tension, and irony as the essential, unifying features of complex literary language, concepts extensively explored in William Empson's *Seven Types of Ambiguity*.

Method of analysis (close reading)

The primary analytical practice was close reading, a meticulous, line-by-line examination of a text's formal elements to demonstrate its organic unity. Practitioners would analyze the intricate relationships between a poem's diction, imagery, metaphor, symbolism, meter, and rhyme scheme. This method deliberately excluded external considerations such as the author's life, the work's historical period, or ideological readings. The goal was to elucidate how all the parts of a work, including its apparent contradictions, resolved into a coherent whole, a process famously detailed in Cleanth Brooks's *The Well Wrought Urn*. This technique became the standard model for literary exegesis in classrooms and textbooks like *Understanding Poetry*.

Major figures and works

Key theorists included John Crowe Ransom, who coined the term in his 1941 book *The New Criticism*, and his Vanderbilt colleagues Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren. Cleanth Brooks, in collaboration with Robert Penn Warren, was instrumental in popularizing the approach through influential textbooks. Other major proponents were René Wellek, who collaborated with Austin Warren on the seminal theoretical work *Theory of Literature*, and the poet-critic R.P. Blackmur. While not strictly a New Critic, the influential work of Northrop Frye in *Anatomy of Criticism* represented a parallel formalist system. The movement's ideas were disseminated widely through journals like *The Kenyon Review* and *The Sewanee Review*.

Influence and legacy

New Criticism profoundly shaped literary pedagogy, especially in the United States, making close reading the foundational skill taught in high school and university English departments. It provided a standardized, teachable method that dominated the curriculum from the 1940s through the 1960s. The movement's emphasis on textual autonomy indirectly paved the way for later theories like structuralism and early deconstruction, which also focused on linguistic structures. Its formalist legacy persists in many introductory literature courses, and its terminology remains part of the basic critical lexicon. Furthermore, its focus on the text as object influenced the development of Russian formalism and the work of the Prague linguistic circle.

Criticisms and decline

The movement began to decline in the 1960s and 1970s with the rise of new theoretical paradigms that explicitly challenged its core tenets. Reader-response criticism, led by figures like Stanley Fish, attacked its neglect of the reader's role. Marxist criticism and the New Historicism of Stephen Greenblatt condemned its abistorical approach and disregard for ideology and power structures. Feminist criticism and postcolonial criticism exposed its alleged universalism as a reflection of specific cultural and patriarchal values. Critics argued that its pursuit of unity often suppressed a text's political, social, and contradictory meanings. By the late 20th century, it was largely supplanted by these more contextual and politically engaged theories, though its methodological tools were often absorbed into eclectic contemporary practices.

Category:Literary criticism Category:Literary theory Category:Formalism (literature)