New Criticism
From W100Wiki
From The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms:
New Criticism, a movement in American literary criticism from the 1930s to the 1960s, concentrating on the verbal complexities and ambiguities of short poems considered as self-sufficient objects without attention to their origins or effects. The name comes from John Crowe Ransom's book The New Criticism (1941), in which he surveyed the theories developed in England by T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, and William Empson, together with the work of the American critic Yvor Winters. Ransom called for a more ‘objective’ criticism focusing on the intrinsic qualities of a work rather than on its biographical or historical context; and his students Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren had already provided a very influential model of such an approach in their college textbook Understanding Poetry (1938), which helped to make New Criticism the academic orthodoxy for the next twenty years. Other critics grouped under this heading, despite their differences, include Allen Tate, R. P. Blackmur, W. K. Wimsatt Jr, and Kenneth Burke. Influenced by T. S. Eliot's view of poetry's autotelic status, and by the detailed semantic analyses of I. A. Richards in Practical Criticism (1929) and Empson in Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), the American New Critics repudiated ‘extrinsic’ criteria for understanding poems, dismissing them under such names as the affective fallacy and the intentional fallacy. Moreover, they sought to overcome the traditional distinction between form and content: for them, a poem was ideally an ‘organic unity’ in which tensions were brought to equilibrium. Their favoured terms of analysis— irony, paradox, imagery, metaphor, and symbol—tended to neglect questions of genre, and were not successfully transferred to the study of dramatic and narrative works. Many later critics—often unsympathetic to the New Critics' Southern religious conservatism—accused them of cutting literature off from history, but their impact has in some ways been irreversible, especially in replacing biographical source-study with text-centred approaches. The outstanding works of New Criticism are Brooks's The Well-Wrought Urn (1947) and Wimsatt's The Verbal Icon (1954).
See close reading for links to some guides to that practice.
