New Criticism

New Criticism was the dominant trend in English and American literary criticism of the early twentieth century, from the 1920s to the early 1960s. Its adherents were emphatic in their advocacy of close reading and attention to texts themselves, and their rejection of criticism based on extra-textual sources, especially biography. At their best, New Critical readings were brilliant, articulately argued, and broad in scope, but sometimes they were idiosyncratic and moralistic.

Key concepts

The notion of ambiguity is an important concept within New Criticism; several promiment New Critics have been enamored above all else with the way that a "text" can display multiple simultaneous meanings. In the 1930s, I.A. Richards borrowed Sigmund Freud's term "overdetermination" (which Louis Althusser would later revive in Marxist political theory) to refer to the multiple meanings which he believed were always simultaneously present in language. To Richards, claiming that a work has "One And Only One True Meaning" is an act of superstition (The Philosophy of Rhetoric, 39).

Related Topics:
Ambiguity - 1930s - I.A. Richards - Sigmund Freud - Overdetermination - Louis Althusser - Marxist - Political theory - Superstition

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In 1954, William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley published an essay entitled "The intentional fallacy", in which they argued strongly against any discussion of an author's intention, or "intended meaning." For Wimsatt and Beardsley, the words on the page were all that mattered; importation of meanings from outside the text was quite irrelevant, and potentially distracting. This became a central tenet of New Criticism.

Related Topics:
1954 - William K. Wimsatt - Monroe Beardsley - Intentional fallacy - Author's intention

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Because New Critics admit no information other than that contained in the "text" which they study, no proper New Critical investigation should include biographical information on the author. Furthermore, studying a passage of prose or poetry in New Critical style requires careful, exacting scrutiny of the passage itself, since after all no other information source is permissable - a rigid attitude for which the New Critics were often scolded in later times: their immanent readings may also be taken as a conservative attempt to isolate the text as a solid, immutable entity, shielded from any external influences. Nevertheless, immanent reading or close reading is now a fundamental tool of literary criticism. Such a reading places great emphasis on the particular over the general, paying close attention to individual words, syntax, and the order in which sentences and ideas unfold as they are read. They look at, for example, theme, imagery, metaphor, rhythm, meter, etc.

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Besides the names mentioned above, other prominent New Critical figures include the following:

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• T.S. Eliot
• F.R. Leavis
• William Empson
• Robert Penn Warren
• John Crowe Ransom
• Cleanth Brooks

Not all the thoughts and works stemming from these individuals fall within the New Critical camp. For example, Eliot?s relationship with New Criticism was rather complicated. In 1956, he claimed that he failed ?to see any school of criticism which can be said to derive from myself,? referring to the New Criticism as ?the lemon-squeezer school of criticism." He never understood the ways that the New Critics had come to interpret The Waste Land, noting in ?Thoughts after Lambeth? (1931) that ?when I wrote a poem called The Waste Land some of the more approving critics said that I had expressed the ?disillusionment of a generation,? which is nonsense. I may have expressed for them their own illusion of being disillusioned, but that did not form part of my intention." A New Critic might respond that paying Eliot any mind would fall into the "intentional fallacy".

Related Topics:
1956 - The Waste Land - 1931

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Empson, too, attempted to distance himself from the New Criticism, and was particularly critical of Wimsatt. His last book, Using Biography, was largely an attempt to refute the doctrine of the "intentional fallacy."

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