New Criticism

This term, set current by the publication of John Crowe Ransom's The New Criticism in 1941, came to be applied to a theory and practice that was prominent in American literary criticism until late in the 1960s. The movement derived in considerable part from elements in I. A Richards' Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and Practical Criticism (1929) and from the critical essays of T. S. Eliot. It opposed the prevailing interest of scholars, critics, and teachers of that era in the biographies of authors, the social context of literature, and literary history by insisting that the proper concern of literary criticism is not with the external circumstances or effects or historical position of a work, but with a detailed consideration of the work itself as an independent entity. Notable critics in this mode were the southerners Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, whose textbooks Understanding Poetry (1938) and Understanding Fiction (1943) did much to make the New Criticism the predominant method of teaching literature in American colleges, and even in high schools, for the next two or three decades. Other prominent writers of that time—in addition to Ransom, Brooks, and Warren—who are often identified as New Critics are Allen Tate, R. P. Blackmur, and William K. Wimsatt. A very influential English critic, E R. Leavis, in turning his attention from background, sources, and biography to the detailed analysis of "literary texts themselves," shared some of the concepts of the New Critics and their analytic focus on what he called "the words on the page." He differed from his American counterparts, however, in his emphasis on the great literary works as a concrete and life-affirming enactment of moral and cultural values; he stressed also the essential role in education of what he called "the Great Tradition" of English literature in advancing the values of culture and "civilization" against the antagonistic forces in modern life.

See F. R. Leavis, Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry (1936); Education and University (1943, 2d ed. 1948); The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry fames, Joseph Conrad (1948); also Anne Sampson, F. R. Leavis (1992).

The New Critics differ from one another in many ways, but the following points of view and procedures are common to many of them.

1. A poem, it is held, should be treated as such—in Eliot's words, "primarily as poetry and not another thing"—and should therefore be regarded as an independent and self-sufficient verbal object. The first law of criticism, John Crowe Ransom said, "is that it shall be objective, shall cite the nature of the object" and shall recognize "the autonomy of the work itself as existing for its own sake." (in objective crìticism.) New Critics warn the reader against critical practices which divert attention from the poem itself (in intentional fallacy and affective fallacy). In analyzing and evaluating a particular work, they eschew reference to the biography and temperament of the author, to the social conditions at the time of its production, or to its psychological and moral effects on the reader; they also tend to minimize recourse to the place of the work in the history of literary forms and subject matter. Because of this critical focus on the literary work in isolation from its attendant circumstances and effects, the New Criticism is often classified as a type of critical formalism. 
2. The principles of the New Criticism are basically verbal. That is, literature is conceived to be a special kind of language whose attributes are defined by systematic opposition to the language of science and of practical and logical discourse, and the explicative procedure is to analyze the meanings and interactions of words, figures of speech, and symbols. The emphasis is on the "organic unity," in a successful literary work, of overall structure and verbal meanings, and we are warned against separating the two by what Cleanth Brooks has called "the heresy of paraphrase."
3. The distinctive procedure of a New Critic is explication, or close reading: the detailed analysis of the complex interrelations and ambiguities (multiple meanings) of the verbal and figurative components within a work. "Explication de texte" (stressing all kinds of information relevant to the full understanding of a word or passage) has long been a formal procedure for teaching literature in French schools, but the kind of explicative analyses of verbal interactions characteristic of the New Criticism derives from such books as I. A. Richards' Practical Crìticism (1929) and William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930).
4. The distinction between literary genres, although acknowledged, does not play an essential role in the New Criticism. The essential components of any work of literature, whether lyric, narrative, or dramatic, are conceived to be words, images, and symbols rather than character, thought, and plot. These linguistic elements, whatever the genre, are often said to be organized around a central and humanly significant theme, and to manifest high literary value to the degree that they manifest "tension," "irony," and "paradox" in achieving a "reconciliation of diverse impulses" or an "equilibrium of opposed forces." The form of a work, whether or not it has characters and plot, is said to be primarily a "structure of meanings," which evolve into an integral and freestanding unity mainly through a play and counter play of "thematic imagery" and "symbolic action."

The basic orientation and modes of analysis in the New Criticism were adapted to the contextual criticism of Eliseo Vivas and Murray Krieger. Krieger defined contextualism as "the claim that the poem is a tight, compelling, finally closed context," which prevents "our escape to the world of reference and action beyond," and requires that we "judge the work's efficacy as an aesthetic object." (See Krieger, The New Apologists for Poetry, 1956, and Theory of Criticism, 1976.) The revolutionary thrust of the mode had lost much of its force by the 1960s, when it gave way to various newer theories of criticism, but it has left a deep and enduring mark on the criticism and teaching of literature, in its primary emphasis on the individual work and in the variety and subtlety of the devices that it made available for analyzing its internal relations. Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, ed. Chavira Hosek and Patricia Parker (1985), is a collection of structuralist, poststructuralist, and other essays which—often in express opposition to the New Criticism—exemplify the diverse newer modes of "close reading"; some of these essays emphasize that competing forces within the language of a lyric poem preclude the possibility of a unified meaning.

Central instances of the theory and practice of New Criticism are Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn (1947), and W. K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon (1954). The enterprises of New Criticism are privileged over alternative approaches to literature in René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (3d ed., 1964), which became a standard reference book in the graduate study of literature. Robert W. Stallman's Critiques and Essays in Criticism, 1920-1948 (1949) is a convenient collection of essays in this critical mode; the literary journal The Explicator (1942 ff.), devoted to close reading, is a characteristic product of its approach to literary texts, as are the items listed in Poetry Explication: A Checklist of Interpretation Since 1924 of British and American Poems and Present, ed. Joseph M. Kuntz (3d ed., 1980).