NEW CRITICISM

New Criticism is an approach to literature, which was developed by a group of American critics, most of whom taught at southern universities during the years following the First World War. Like , following Boris Eikhenbaum and Victor Shklovskii, the New Critics developed speculative positions and techniques of reading that provide a vital complement to the literary and artistic emergence of modernism. The New Critics wanted to avoid impressionistic criticism, which risked being shallow and arbitrary, and social/ historical (Marxist) approaches, which might easily be subsumed by other disciplines. They were given their name by John Crowe Ransom, who describes the new American formalists in his book The New Criticism (1941). The movement took its first inspirations from TS Eliot and IA Richards’ thoughts on criticism. The far-reaching influence of New Criticism stems less from theoretical or programmatic coherence than from the practical appeal of a characteristic way of reading. The theoretical differences among the critics commonly described as New Critics( , Empson, , , John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, , Cleanth Brooks, , W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., ,) are sometimes so great as to leave little ground for agreement.

As much as they abhorred the new "scientism" that passed for authority in the modern era, the New Critics believed the study of literature could be more organized and systematic than it had been in the past. Specifically, they believed they could isolate the object of their work just as other "sciences" had isolated their objects of study. For the New Critic, the province or object of the activity of criticism would be the text "itself” and not its historical context, not its author, and not its bibliographic history. These were specialized areas of inquiry "scholars" might worry about in the privacy of some graduate library. What the New Critics wanted to discuss was the part of literature that made literature "literary" i.e. its FORMAL characteristics. New Criticism was so influential that for many teachers in North America and Britain, it became not a method of criticism, but criticism itself and alternatives to its interpretive strategies have until recently been regarded with deep suspicion.

Join now!

The New Criticism asserts that every text is autonomous. History, biography, sociology, psychology, author's intention and reader's private experience are irrelevant. William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley describe two other fallacies which are encountered in the study of literature . The Intentional Fallacy is the mistake of attempting to understand the author's intentions when interpreting a literary work. Such an approach is fallacious because the meaning of a work should be contained solely within the work itself, and attempts to understand the author's intention violate the autonomy of the work. The Affective Fallacy is the mistake of equating a work with its ...

This is a preview of the whole essay