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New Criticism
New Criticism
New Criticism
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New Criticism was a 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 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.[1] 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 intentional fallacy and affective fallacy. Also very influential were the 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

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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.[2]

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.[3]

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 structuralism and post-structuralism in the 1960s and 1970s. Other schools of critical theory including, feminist literary criticism, 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, New Criticism is a reemergence of the Southern Agrarians.[4] In his essay, "The New Criticism", Cleanth Brooks notes that "The New Critic, like the Snark, is a very elusive beast", meaning that there was no clearly defined "New Critical" manifesto, school, or stance.[5] Nevertheless, a number of writings outline inter-related New Critical ideas.

In 1946, William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley published a classic and controversial New Critical essay entitled "The Intentional Fallacy", in which they argued strongly against the relevance of an 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, "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).[6]

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, characterization, and plot were used to identify the theme of the text. In addition to the theme, the New Critics also looked for paradox, ambiguity, irony, and 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, 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.[7]

Criticism

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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."[8][9]

Indicative of the 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."[9] 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."[9]

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."[10]

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".[8][11] 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.[12]

Important texts

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References

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Sources

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  • 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 [2].
  • Davis, Garrick. Praising It New. Swallow, 2008. Anthology that includes some of the keys texts of the New Criticism.

Further reading

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New Criticism

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New Criticism was a formalist school of that emerged in the early and dominated Anglo-American literary studies from to the , emphasizing the autonomy of the literary text and the practice of to uncover its intrinsic formal qualities, such as irony, , tension, and , while rejecting extrinsic elements like authorial biography, historical context, or reader emotions. The movement originated in Britain with influences from critics like I.A. Richards, who promoted practical criticism through textual analysis without reference to external aids, and T.S. Eliot, whose essays on tradition and metaphysical poetry underscored the organic unity of form and content. It gained prominence in the United States through figures such as John Crowe Ransom, who coined the term in his 1941 book The New Criticism, Cleanth Brooks, known for analyzing paradox as central to poetic success in works like The Well Wrought Urn (1947), and Robert Penn Warren, co-author of influential textbooks that institutionalized close reading in pedagogy. Other key proponents included Allen Tate, William K. Wimsatt, and Monroe Beardsley, who formalized concepts like the intentional fallacy—the error of equating a work's meaning with the author's intended meaning—and the affective fallacy, dismissing emotional responses as irrelevant to textual interpretation. New Criticism's defining achievement lay in enforcing methodological rigor on literary analysis, treating poems and texts as self-contained verbal artifacts whose meaning arises from internal tensions and reconciliations rather than paraphraseable content, a stance epitomized by Brooks's "." This approach revolutionized and by prioritizing empirical scrutiny of language's texture over impressionistic or ideological readings, fostering a generation of scholars focused on the text's formal integrity. However, it faced controversies for its perceived narrowness, with detractors arguing it ignored causal links to cultural production and reception, though proponents maintained that such exclusions preserved the work's objective status against subjective distortions. By the late 1960s, New Criticism waned amid the rise of , , and culturally oriented theories that reintroduced contextual factors, yet its legacy endures in the persistent value placed on precise textual explication in academic and critical practice.

Historical Origins

Precursors in Britain and Europe

In Biographia Literaria (1817), proposed the principle of organic unity, describing a poem as a self-developing entity akin to a living organism, in which parts interdependently contribute to an indivisible whole of . This conception, rooted in empirical of textual structure, countered mechanistic views of literature and supplied later formalists with a basis for treating works as autonomous, internally coherent artifacts rather than products of external influences. Ivor Armstrong Richards advanced practical methodologies in Practical Criticism (1929), where he distributed anonymized poems to undergraduates, analyzing their interpretive protocols to reveal subjective distortions and advocate disciplined, evidence-based reading. By prioritizing textual evidence over impressionistic reactions or contextual assumptions, Richards' exercises fostered skills in —dissecting diction, , and —that became central to formalist , demonstrating how reader responses could be objectively refined through textual focus alone. T.S. Eliot's (1919) articulated an impersonal aesthetic, asserting that poetry achieves impersonality by subordinating the poet's emotions and biography to a catalytic process yielding objective correlatives within the text, informed by historical tradition rather than personal expression. Eliot emphasized the work's existence as a self-sustaining structure, evaluated through its formal success in evoking precise emotions, thereby redirecting criticism from authorial genius to verifiable textual effects and unity. Russian Formalism contributed continental precedents, notably Viktor Shklovsky's "Art as Technique" (1917), which defined (ostranenie) as the technique of perceiving habitual objects anew through slowed, estranged representation, isolating literature's distinctive devices from everyday language. Formalists like Shklovsky prioritized literariness—the sum of formal disruptions over mimetic content—urging analysis of how techniques generate effects, a causal emphasis on internal mechanics that resonated with British formalists despite limited direct transmission, as mediated via scholars and shared anti-impressionist aims.

Emergence in American Academia

New Criticism emerged in the United States during the 1930s as a formalist approach to literary analysis, primarily through the efforts of Southern intellectuals associated with in Nashville. The movement's roots lay in the Fugitive poets, a group active in the 1920s that included , , and , who published the The Fugitive from 1922 to 1925 and emphasized amid cultural tensions in the post-World War I South. This circle evolved into the , who in 1930 issued the manifesto I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, a collection of essays by twelve Vanderbilt-affiliated writers decrying the homogenizing effects of industrialization and advocating for a decentralized, tradition-rooted society as a counter to Northern progressive reforms and economic centralization. For these figures, the turn to textual formalism in criticism served as an intellectual refuge, prioritizing the intrinsic structure of literature over extrinsic historicist interpretations often aligned with New Deal-era ideologies that favored social engineering and materialist progress. Ransom played a pivotal role in institutionalizing these ideas after relocating from Vanderbilt to in , where he established a hub for promoting disciplined, ontology-centered literary study. His founding and editorship of The Kenyon Review, launched in 1939, featured essays that advanced and the autonomy of the poetic artifact, drawing contributors from the Agrarian network and fostering a shift away from impressionistic or ideologically driven criticism prevalent in academia. This platform enabled Ransom to cultivate a generation of scholars, including former students like , who applied these methods in university teaching, particularly at Midwestern and Southern institutions resistant to the dominant biographical and socio-economic approaches of the era. The movement gained its name from Ransom's 1941 book The New Criticism, which compiled and expanded his earlier essays to argue for criticism as a rigorous, professional enterprise focused on the "world's body" rendered in textual form, distinct from scientific or moralistic reductions. Complementing this theoretical groundwork, Brooks and Warren's 1938 textbook Understanding Poetry marked a pedagogical turning point, introducing American college students to intrinsic analysis through annotated examples that eschewed or historical context in favor of structural ; its widespread adoption at universities like Vanderbilt and accelerated the integration of New Critical practices into English departments.

Core Principles and Methodology

Textual Autonomy and Close Reading

New Criticism asserts the textual autonomy of literary works, maintaining that a poem or prose piece exists as a self-sufficient entity whose meaning emerges exclusively from its internal linguistic and structural features, rendering external references unnecessary for interpretation. This principle, articulated by in his 1941 book The New Criticism, posits the text as a "closed" system where interpretive validity depends on verifiable patterns within the words themselves, not on derivations from authorial biography or cultural milieu. At the heart of this methodology lies , a rigorous, line-by-line dissection of the text's formal components—including , , , , and rhetorical devices—to expose inherent ambiguities, ironies, and tensions that contribute to the work's coherence. Practitioners treated this as an , prioritizing observable data in the over impressionistic responses; for instance, syntactic inversions or recurrent motifs serve as causal agents generating layered meanings resolvable only through textual evidence. By focusing on how specific word choices and structural arrangements interlock, close reading reveals the text's self-generated dynamics, eschewing paraphrase in favor of tracing precise mechanisms of semantic production. Central to achieving interpretive depth is the doctrine of organic unity, wherein form and content fuse inseparably to form a harmonious whole, with discordances like or reconciled internally rather than discursively explained away. exemplified this in (1947), likening the successful poem to a "well-wrought "—a crafted object of balanced proportions where oppositional elements, such as metaphorical tensions, integrate into structural integrity without external mediation. This unity manifests through verifiable textual patterns, such as interlocking imagery or ironic modulations, ensuring that the work's efficacy stems from its intrinsic architecture rather than abstracted propositions.

Rejection of Extrinsic Factors

New Critics maintained that valid literary interpretation must derive exclusively from the text's internal evidence, deliberately excluding extrinsic factors such as authorial , , or reader psychology to ensure objectivity and avoid subjective distortions. This approach emphasized epistemic rigor by prioritizing verifiable linguistic and structural features over speculative external data, which often lack direct causal linkage to the work's meaning. Central to this rejection was the "intentional fallacy," articulated by W. K. Wimsatt Jr. and Monroe C. Beardsley in their 1946 essay, which argued that inferring a poem's meaning from the author's intended purpose constitutes a logical error, as private intentions cannot serve as public, objective standards for judgment. They contended that such appeals to psychologism undermine criticism by substituting unverifiable mental states for the text's autonomous formal properties, insisting instead that meaning resides in the words as they appear, amenable to logical scrutiny. Complementing this, their 1949 essay on the "" dismissed evaluations based on a reader's emotional responses as irrelevant, equating such judgments with impressionistic relativism rather than disciplined analysis of the poem's design. Cleanth Brooks reinforced this textual isolation through his concept of the "heresy of paraphrase," outlined in the 1947 book , which posits that poems cannot be adequately conveyed or assessed via summaries, as their semantic content emerges irreducibly from tensions like irony and embedded in the structure. Brooks argued that paraphrasing flattens these formal complexities, distorting the work's unity and substituting didactic content for aesthetic achievement, thereby privileging the text's self-contained evidence against reductive or ideological impositions. This stance countered impressionistic overlays by demanding interpretations grounded solely in what the language demonstrably supports, fostering a method resistant to biases introduced by non-textual variables.

Key Figures and Texts

John Crowe Ransom and Ontological Focus

(1888–1974) played a foundational role in New Criticism by shifting literary analysis toward the of texts, insisting on their examination as self-contained entities embodying concrete reality. In his 1937 essay "Criticism, Inc.," published in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Ransom called for criticism to professionalize as a scientific discipline centered on , rejecting dominance by , , or personal impression. He argued that the critic must treat the poem "as nothing short of a desperate ontological or cosmic savage," prioritizing its intrinsic being over extrinsic paraphrases or moral utilities. This ontological focus aimed to elevate criticism beyond amateurism, establishing it as an autonomous study of the artwork's essential structure and texture. Ransom expanded this framework in his 1938 essay collection The World's Body, where he delineated poetry's dual aspects: a "Platonic" logical structure of abstract universals and a "physicalist" texture of local, irreducible . He contended that superior poems achieve equilibrium between these, with texture—comprising metaphors, rhythms, and sensory details—resisting reduction to propositional content and preserving the world's corporeal density against abstract idealization. In "Poetry: A Note on ," a key chapter, Ransom portrayed poetry as an antidote to scientism's disembodied , affirming knowledge through the tangible body's knowability rather than pure intellection. Ransom's ontological emphasis drew from his Southern conservative roots as a poet and Agrarian contributor to I'll Take My Stand (), fostering a wary of Northern industrial and universalist ideologies. This informed his advocacy for poetry's textured concreteness as a bulwark against the era's scientistic and moralistic reductions, privileging regional particularity and metaphysical realism in literary truth. His ideas thus positioned New Criticism as a defense of art's independent cognitive value, rooted in empirical engagement with form over ideological overlay.

Cleanth Brooks and Paradox

, a prominent New Critic, emphasized as a core mechanism for achieving poetic unity and truth in his seminal 1947 work : Studies in the Structure of . In this collection of essays, Brooks contended that great poetry does not convey straightforward propositions but instead reconciles opposing ideas through ironic tension and paradoxical language, thereby capturing the multifaceted nature of human experience. He argued that such resolution forms the "structure" of the poem, distinguishing it from discursive prose that seeks logical consistency over dramatic reconciliation. Central to Brooks's thesis is the chapter "The Language of Paradox," where he demonstrates that paradox permeates poetic meaning, often aligning with metaphysical conceits in poets like John Donne. For instance, in analyzing Donne's "The Canonization," Brooks highlights how the poem paradoxically elevates profane love to sacred martyrdom, yoking irreconcilable domains—erotic passion and religious canonization—into a unified artifact that resists reduction to moral allegory. Similarly, he examines Wordsworth's "It is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free," revealing ironic undercurrents that subvert surface sentimentality, underscoring paradox's role in preventing simplistic interpretations. Brooks maintained that these devices enable poetry to embody truths indirectly, as direct statement would dissolve the poem's organic wholeness. Brooks explicitly rejected , viewing attempts to extract ethical or propositional content from as distorting its essence. He termed such efforts the "heresy of paraphrase," asserting that poetry's value resides in dramatizing unresolved ambiguities and contextual relations rather than in imparting clear lessons or resolutions akin to scientific or philosophical discourse. This stance prioritized the poem's internal dynamics over extrinsic moralizing, aligning with New Criticism's broader aversion to treating as a vehicle for instruction. Brooks's approach employed an empirical-like method of , wherein critical principles emerge inductively from rigorous dissection of the text's language, imagery, and structure, rather than from preconceived ideologies or biographical impositions. This "disinterested" , as he termed it, focused on verifiable textual evidence to uncover unity amid apparent discord, fostering a scientific rigor in literary study that eschewed subjective moral judgments. By grounding interpretation in the poem's self-contained elements, Brooks promoted a that treated as an autonomous object worthy of precise, evidence-based scrutiny.

Collaborative Works and Textbooks

Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren's Understanding Poetry, first published in 1938, served as a foundational for disseminating New Critical principles through pedagogical annotations that exemplified techniques applied to selected poems. The volume included works by poets such as , , , and , with analyses focused exclusively on linguistic structure, imagery, and irony, deliberately omitting biographical details or historical backgrounds to train students in deriving meaning from textual evidence alone. This approach standardized interpretive protocols by modeling how to substantiate claims through direct quotation and logical of the poem's organic unity. Building on this framework, Brooks and Warren released Understanding Fiction in 1943, applying analogous methods to prose selections including short stories by authors like and . The textbook featured extensive interpretive essays that dissected narrative techniques, ambiguity, and thematic tensions within the fiction itself, reinforcing the rejection of extrinsic or cultural in favor of the work's internal dynamics. These annotations provided scalable tools for classroom analysis, emphasizing and irony as verifiable elements of textual autonomy. The collaborative textbooks adapted protocols from I.A. Richards' Practical Criticism (1929), which advocated empirical scrutiny of literary judgments, but tailored them for American undergraduate instruction by prioritizing defensible, text-bound arguments over subjective impressions. By integrating excerpts with demonstrative , Brooks and Warren's works codified New Criticism's , enabling widespread adoption of as a replicable practice in literary education.

Applications in Criticism

Analysis of Poetry and Fiction

New Criticism's application to poetry emphasized to identify internal tensions, such as irony and , that resolve into the poem's organic unity, treating the text as a self-contained structure where meaning emerges from formal elements like , , and . In ' 1947 essay "The Language of Paradox," he exemplifies this by analyzing William Wordsworth's "It is a beauteous evening, calm and free," initially appearing to celebrate serene pantheistic harmony in nature but revealing ironic tension through the girl's contrasting restlessness and devout piety, which undercuts the speaker's imposed calm and highlights unresolved spiritual discord. Brooks argues this , far from undermining the poem, constitutes its structure, as the language resists simplistic paraphrase and demands scrutiny of oppositional forces for coherence. Extending these methods to fiction, New Critics adapted close reading to narrative forms, focusing on how ambiguities in point of view, motif recurrence, and ironic reversals generate thematic depth without reliance on authorial biography or historical context. In their 1943 textbook Understanding Fiction, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren illustrate this through analyses of short stories, such as Katherine Anne Porter's "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall," where stream-of-consciousness motifs and delayed revelations create ironic layers between the protagonist's self-deception and objective reality, linking causal narrative ambiguities to the story's unified ironic resolution. Techniques involved tracing how recurring images or structural patterns—verifiable within the text—propel dramatic irony, ensuring interpretations remain tethered to the work's intrinsic dynamics rather than extrinsic interpretations. This approach positioned poetry as paradigmatic for its condensed form but proved adaptable to fiction's extended structures, prioritizing textual evidence over speculative causation.

Exemplary Critiques

John Crowe Ransom exemplified New Critical methodology in his ontological analyses of poetry, particularly through discussions of that prioritized the text's texture—the concrete, local particulars irreducible to —over abstract Platonic ideas conveyed via logical structure. In The World's Body (1938), Ransom posited that poetry's essence lies in balancing discursive structure, which approximates Platonic universals, with textured particulars that mimic the world's irreducible body, using Shakespearean examples to illustrate how sonnets achieve density through sensory concretes rather than idea alone. He further applied this in critiquing William Empson's ambiguous reading of ("That time of year thou mayst in me behold"), faulting it for diffusing focus across equivocations without privileging the sonnet's salient textual unities and material textures that generate coherent effect. Allen Tate's essay "A Reading of Keats" (1945–1946) demonstrated similar rigor in formalist close reading of Keats' odes, such as "Ode to a Nightingale," by isolating symbolic densities and internal tensions to uncover the poem's autonomous structure. Tate dissected Keats' imagery through "tension"—the organized interplay of extension (outward reference) and intension (inward connotation)—arguing that the ode's nightingale symbolizes dialectical escape and entrapment, unified not by biographical intent or historical context but by intrinsic symbolic oppositions yielding organic wholeness. This approach revealed how Keats' concrete symbols, like the "embalmed darkness," cohere through formal irony, eschewing extrinsic moralizing for the text's self-contained symbolic logic. Such critiques empirically validated New Criticism by tracing causal mechanisms within the text, where elements like irony and forge unity—for instance, Ransom's textured particulars resolving ambiguities into singular effect, or Tate's tensions synthesizing Keats' oppositions absent in historicist reductions to era or author —thus exposing formal dynamics historicism overlooks.

Reception and Institutional Influence

Adoption in Universities

New Criticism gained prominence in American universities in the aftermath of , emerging as the prevailing method for literary analysis in English departments during the and 1950s. This institutionalization positioned of texts as the core practice, supplanting earlier emphases on philological, , and historical scholarship that prioritized external contexts such as authorial or socio-political backgrounds. By the early , key proponents had secured academic footholds, enabling the approach to reshape departmental curricula and research agendas nationwide. The spread originated in Southern universities, where figures like advanced its tenets through outlets such as the Kenyon Review, founded in 1939 at and serving as a primary vehicle for disseminating New Critical principles. From these regional bases, the methodology extended to institutions and other elite centers by the mid-century, reflecting a broader of literary studies amid expanding higher education enrollment. This diffusion aligned with a intellectual climate favoring empirical precision, wherein the text's status as a self-contained, verifiable object invited analytical rigor comparable to scientific inquiry, thereby lending an aura of objectivity during the Cold War's emphasis on verifiable evidence over ideological speculation. By the 1950s, New Criticism's dominance was evident in the surge of publications and academic works employing , which became the standard for evaluating literary structure and meaning independently of extrinsic influences. This facilitated the training of generations of scholars, embedding textual autonomy as a foundational principle in graduate programs and influencing the direction of peer-reviewed journals and monographs.

Pedagogical Reforms

The adoption of New Critical principles prompted a fundamental shift in literary , moving away from historical surveys and biographical studies toward intensive and textual . Prior to the 1940s, English courses often emphasized rote memorization of literary history and authorial backgrounds, but New Criticism advocated training students to derive meaning directly from linguistic evidence within the work itself, treating poems and fiction as autonomous artifacts. This reform injected methodological rigor into what had previously resembled a "gentlemanly practice of amateur history," elevating analytical skills over impressionistic or contextual speculation. Central to this transformation was the textbook Understanding Poetry (1938) by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, which became a staple in college curricula through its revised editions in 1950 and 1960. The anthology featured annotated poems paired with guided questions that modeled evidence-driven analysis, dispensing with prerequisites like extensive historical knowledge to make poetry accessible via direct engagement with form, irony, and ambiguity. By the 1950s, such texts dominated introductory literature courses in American universities, shaping pedagogy to prioritize skill acquisition in parsing paradoxes and tensions inherent in the text. This approach fostered precision in argumentation, enabling students to support interpretations with verifiable textual citations rather than subjective intuitions. While these reforms enhanced the teachability of and democratized access by reducing reliance on elite , they drew criticism for potentially narrowing interpretive scope by bracketing extrinsic factors like or socio-historical influences. Proponents argued that the method's emphasis on intrinsic evidence promoted transferable , contributing to the discipline's academic professionalization amid post-World War II expansions in higher education. However, the exclusion of broader contexts risked producing insular readings that overlooked causal links between texts and their production environments, a limitation later highlighted in challenges to New Criticism's .

Criticisms and Controversies

Ideological Objections from Left-Wing Perspectives

Marxist critics in the mid-20th century charged New Criticism with embodying bourgeois formalism by prioritizing the text's internal structure over its socio-economic determinants, thereby evading literature's role in reflecting class conflict. This approach, they argued, disqualified essential external evidence such as , which views art as a product of material conditions and ideological superstructures. By insisting on textual autonomy, New Critics were seen as depoliticizing literature, stripping it of its potential didactic function in advancing proletarian consciousness during eras of economic upheaval like the . F.O. Matthiessen exemplified such historicist alternatives in the 1940s, blending selective formalist techniques with Marxist-influenced contextual analysis to highlight literature's ties to democratic and social struggles, critiquing unchecked formalism for isolating works from their cultural and intellectual milieus. In American Renaissance (1941), Matthiessen examined 19th-century American authors through lenses of history and ideology, urging critics to incorporate lessons from 1930s Marxist thinkers like V.L. Parrington rather than confining analysis to irony and ambiguity. His Christian socialist perspective framed pure New Criticism as insufficient for addressing power imbalances, advocating instead for interpretations that engaged broader societal responsibilities. From the 1970s onward, feminist theorists extended these ideological objections, decrying New Criticism's neglect of gender as a structural blind spot that reinforced patriarchal norms by treating texts as gender-neutral artifacts. Elaine Showalter's , outlined in "Toward a Feminist " (1979), rejected formalist isolation in favor of excavating ' traditions and the socio-cultural constraints on female expression, arguing that ambiguity-focused readings obscured how literature perpetuated male dominance. Such critiques positioned New Criticism as complicit in systemic biases, prioritizing aesthetic closure over interrogating representations of women that sustained unequal power dynamics. These left-leaning perspectives, prevalent in academia amid rising institutional leftward tilts, often prioritized ideological frameworks over textual evidence, reflecting a broader pattern of subordinating literary analysis to activist agendas.

Challenges from Post-Structuralism and Historicism

Post-structuralist thought, particularly Jacques Derrida's emerging in the late 1960s, mounted a fundamental challenge to New Criticism's core tenets of textual autonomy and interpretive closure. Derrida's 1966 lecture "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," delivered at , critiqued structuralist underpinnings shared with formalism by exposing the illusion of stable centers in language and texts, introducing —the perpetual deferral and difference of meaning that undermines binary oppositions and unified interpretations. This approach rejected New Criticism's reliance on irony, paradox, and ambiguity to achieve organic unity, arguing instead that texts harbor undecidable aporias and endless interpretive play, rendering claims of definitive textual coherence philosophically naive and logocentric. Deconstructive readings, popularized in American academia during the 1970s through figures like and at Yale, treated New Critical as insufficiently rigorous, as it presupposed resolvable tensions rather than revealing the text's self-subverting structures. Parallelly, , coalescing in the early 1980s under Stephen Greenblatt's leadership, assailed New Criticism's ahistorical text-centrism as an evasion of 's entanglement in power dynamics and cultural circulation. Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980) exemplified this by analyzing Elizabethan texts alongside non-literary documents to demonstrate how literary forms negotiate ideological containment and subversion within historical networks, influenced by Michel Foucault's conceptions of and from works like (1966). New Historicists contended that isolating the text from its socio-political "poetics"—the reciprocal exchanges between art and institutions—distorts causal understanding, as formalism abstracts from the material conditions that shape and are shaped by it, such as courtly negotiations of . These assaults collectively portrayed New Criticism's text-only focus as ignoring both linguistic instability and verifiable historical contingencies, prioritizing illusory self-sufficiency over broader causal chains. dissolved textual unity into undecidability, while re-embedded works in power-laden contexts, yet both approaches faced scrutiny for substituting interpretive multiplicities or conjectural histories—often unverifiable beyond selective archival impositions—for the falsifiable evidence inherent in direct textual propositions.

Responses and Defenses

Proponents of New Criticism rebutted charges of ahistoricism by asserting that external contexts, while potentially informative, frequently introduce unverifiable speculations that distort the text's intrinsic structure, whereas yields directly observable evidence from the words on the page. W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, in their 1946 essay "The Intentional Fallacy," defended the autonomy of the literary work by arguing that an author's intended meaning or biographical details cannot reliably determine interpretation, as such appeals conflate private psychology with public artifact and undermine objective analysis. This position prioritized textual evidence as the causally for meaning, dismissing historicist reductions as prone to subjective projection unless corroborated by the poem's formal tensions and ambiguities. Cleanth Brooks further fortified these defenses against reductionist critiques, including those from historicism, by emphasizing irony's structural inescapability in . In his 1947 book , Brooks demonstrated through analyses of works like Donne's "" that poems achieve unity not through propositional or historical , but via ironic reconciliations of opposing impulses, rendering simplistic ideological or contextual overlays inadequate. He termed the attempt to extract a prose "statement" from the "heresy of ," arguing it ignores the empirical density of verbal irony and , which demand rigorous, text-bound scrutiny over external impositions. This approach, Brooks maintained, exposed the fallacies in Marxist or Freudian readings that prioritize latent social doctrines, as such methods fail to account for the poem's self-contained contradictions verifiable only through close examination. New Critics also countered post-structuralist deconstructions by upholding the text's potential for coherent interpretation grounded in formal , rather than endless deferral of meaning. While acknowledging that historical contexts might illuminate ambiguities, defenders like Brooks insisted on subordinating them to textual primacy, as unmoored risks causal overreach—attributing influences without textual warrant—and erodes interpretive rigor. Regarding ideological objections, particularly from left-wing perspectives seeking literature's subordination to social , New Criticism's insistence on aesthetic resisted the influx of politicized methodologies in academia, preserving empirical focus amid the era's cultural upheavals and forestalling uses of texts as vehicles for unsupported by formal . This insulation, though critiqued as quietist, enabled defenses against biased appropriations, prioritizing verifiable textual causality over speculative agendas often amplified in institutionally left-leaning scholarship.

Decline and Enduring Legacy

Factors Contributing to Waning Dominance

The dominance of New Criticism began eroding in the amid broader cultural upheavals, including the Vietnam War-era politicization of universities, which rendered its text-autonomous approach increasingly untenable against demands for literature's social relevance. Social movements of the era, such as civil rights and anti-war protests, prioritized contextual analysis over formalist , fostering by linking texts to power structures and ideologies. This shift fragmented the movement's insistence on intrinsic textual meaning, as evidenced by the mid-1970s emergence of , which challenged New Criticism's presupposition of coherent, self-contained works. A pivotal front in the "theory wars" unfolded at during the 1970s, where the Yale School—comprising critics like , , and Geoffrey Hartman—advanced as a radical extension and critique of New Critical methods. undermined the formalist focus on textual unity by emphasizing and undecidability, arguing that meaning is perpetually deferred rather than fixed within the text, thus eroding the movement's core tenet of interpretive closure. Concurrently, the infusion of through and postcolonial theory in the 1970s reasserted extrinsic factors like , historical context, and cultural ideology, directly countering New Criticism's "" and biographical fallacies. Institutionally, English departments underwent syllabus transformations from the late 1960s into the 1980s, driven by student-led revolts and policies that diversified faculty and curricula away from formalist emphases on . The proliferation of programs, influenced by Marxist and sociological frameworks, supplanted with analyses of mass culture and power dynamics, as seen in curricular chaos where traditional requirements yielded to competing interdisciplinary offerings. Graduate training increasingly prioritized Continental theory over primary textual engagement, a trend noted in 1982 critiques of academic . Internally, New Criticism's methodological limits—its ahistoricism and narrow focus on paradox-laden elite texts like —drew accusations of detachment from broader audiences and real-world causation, though such critiques often stemmed from ideologically driven sources in left-leaning academia rather than empirical data. This overemphasis on verbal complexity alienated emerging diverse readerships seeking accessible, contextually grounded interpretations, contributing to its marginalization without robust evidence of widespread reader surveys.

Revivals in New Formalism

In the early 2000s, New Formalism emerged as a critical movement seeking to reinvigorate attention to literary form and structure, positioning itself against the dominance of contextual and historicist approaches that prioritized ideological interpretations over textual autonomy. Scholars associated with this revival, such as those responding to Marjorie Levinson's 2007 PMLA essay "What Is New Formalism?", argued for a methodological shift that treats form not as an isolated aesthetic feature but as dynamically intertwined with social and material conditions, while resisting reductions of literature to mere vehicles for political advocacy. This effort critiqued New Historicism's tendency to subordinate formal analysis to historical contingencies, often influenced by prevailing academic biases toward left-leaning contextual impositions, advocating instead for rigorous, evidence-based examinations of how forms generate meaning through internal dynamics. By the , proponents extended New Formalism's principles to counter what they saw as excesses in politicized criticism, emphasizing close reading's capacity to reveal causal mechanisms within texts independent of external agendas. A article in Postmodern Culture titled "Reviving Formalism in the " exemplified this, portraying formalism as a corrective to post-2000 professional trends where literary study increasingly aligned with ideological conformity, proposing speculative approaches that integrate form with broader to prioritize textual evidence over narrative-driven . Such revivals align with causal realism by grounding interpretations in verifiable textual patterns, challenging the normalization of readings that impose contemporary political frameworks without empirical textual support. In digital humanities, New Formalist techniques have found empirical traction through computational tools that enhance close reading with data-driven analysis, enabling scalable scrutiny of formal elements like rhythm, syntax, and narrative structure across corpora. Works such as Close Reading with Computers (2019) demonstrate how algorithms can quantify and visualize intrinsic textual features, providing objective metrics that bypass subjective ideological overlays and reveal patterns overlooked in traditional contextual criticism. This integration counters anti-formalist dismissals by offering reproducible evidence of form's causal role in meaning production, fostering "anti-woke" literary studies that prioritize textual fidelity amid academia's systemic tilt toward politicized .

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