New Criticism was a formalist literary theory movement that dominated American literary Criticism in the middle of the 20th century.
It looks at literary works based on what is written and not at the author's goals or biographical issues.
It emphasized close reading, particularly poetry.
The goal is to discover how literature functions as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object.
The New criticism movement derived its name from John Crowe Ransom's 1941 book The New Criticism.
I.A. Richards's Practical Criticism (1929): A Study of Literary Judgment.
I. A. Richards, especially his Practical Criticism and The Meaning of Meaning.
It offered what was claimed to be an empirical scientific approach, which was essential to developing a New Critical methodology.
Richards has been called the father of New Criticism.
I. A. Richards was one of the first to study literary interpretation as a science.
New Criticism includes the critical essays of T. S. Eliot.
Eliot developed the "theory of impersonality" in "Tradition and the Individual Talent".
He coined "objective correlative" in his "Hamlet and His Problems."
Eliot's evaluative judgments include his condemnation of Milton and Dryden and his liking for the so-called metaphysical poets.
His insistence that poetry must be impersonal greatly influenced the formation of the New Critical canon.
The term "New Criticism" refers to a style of criticism advocated by academics in the first half of the 20th century.
New Criticism tended to view texts as autonomous and closed, meaning everything necessary to understand them is contained within them.
The reader does not need external sources, such as the author’s biography, to fully understand a text; however, New Critics did not entirely disregard the relevance of the author, background, or possible sources of the work; nevertheless, they maintained that such information had very little bearing on the literary merit of the work.
A similar emphasis was placed on the variety and degree of certain literary devices used by New Critics, particularly metaphor, irony, tension, and paradox, in the same manner as Formalists.
The New Critics emphasized “close reading” to engage with a text and pay close attention to the interactions between form and meaning.
Important New Critics included:
Allen Tate,
Robert Penn Warren,
John Crowe Ransom,
Cleanth Brooks,
William Empson,
F.R. Leavis.
William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley coined the term “intentional fallacy”;
Other terms associated with New Criticism include “affective fallacy,” “heresy of paraphrase,” and “ambiguity.”
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