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...
Posts
The Jan/Feb issue of Men's Journal includes a piece of salesmanship on behalf of the tourist industry in the city of Miami, Florida. Why am I slumming for blog topics? My love of paradox. Anyway, the gist of this piece is its effort to bathe the already tourist-friendly, and tourist-befriended, city in the waters of sophistication. The writer, Mark Healy, is not to be held responsible for the headline or subhead. The writer never is. In this case, though, I submit that the headline fairly expresses the gist of Healy's lead paragraph. So I'll start with it. "Miami Gets Real: America's greatest urban beach has evolved beyond its cheesy South Beach years with an international art scene, serious cocktails, and food that's worth the flight." The angle of the story, then, is that you - a traveler sufficiently sophisticated to be looking to Men's Journal for guidance -- are too high-brow to have been taken in by the cheesy look of, say, The Birdcag...