They used to call it the "new criticism," but that isn't a name that wears well. I think of it as formalism. It is simply the formalism distinctive to the mid-20th century in literary studies.
The New Criticism (1941) was a book by John Crowe Ransom that gave its name to a literary/theoretical movement.
Besides Ransom the important figures in the movement included Cleanth Brooks, I.A. Richards, and a two headed beast, William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley.
Salient features of the movement are these:
- close reading and explication of the text. This would seem obviously something a good critic must do, but it was a rebuke to romantic scholars who showed off their contextualizing erudition and engaged in emotional effusions at the expense of this focus on the text.
- a deliberate detachment from the issue of what the author of a text MEANT to say. What matters is what he did say, the text before us, not intentions that other sorts of scholars might divine from his biography.
- also a detachment from the “affective” aspect of a text — how does it make readers feel? close readers needn’t care.
- A love of paradox, ambiguity, and irony. Finding these prizes in a text is their psychic reward for the close focus thereon.
I was never a fan, but I'm not sure that its passing (by 1970 or so it was on the defensive, now it is almost forgotten) was ever quite justified either.
I've included a photo of Brooks above, and will end this brief appreciation of their movement with a quote of his:
Poetry is "a language in which the connotations play as great a part as the denotations. And I do not mean that the connotations are important as supplying some sort of frill or trimming, something external to the real matter in hand. I mean that the poet does not use a notation at all -- as science may be properly said to do. The poet, within limits, has to make his language as he goes."
The Well Wrought Urn!
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