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.

Works

• Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity and Some Versions of Pastoral are among the preeminent New Critical works. Their broad taxonomic ambition, in both cases, ranges over a good portion of the literary canon in an attempt to define a literary device or trope.
• Richards's Practical Criticism is one of the most "theoretical" works of the New Criticism; that is, it is a reflection on critical method.
• Wimsatt and Beardsley concisely defined the two anathemas of the New Criticism in their well-known essays "The Intentional Fallacy" and "The Affective Fallacy."
• Brooks's The Well-Wrought Urn is among the best-known examples of New Critical poetry explication. Also often referenced for its essay "The Heresy of Paraphrase" and its discussion of paradox in literature.
• Ransom's essay "The New Criticism," from which the movement received its name.

The New Criticism is one of the concepts satirized in Isaac Asimov's short story "The Immortal Bard" (1954), in which a physics professor learns the secret of time travel and tries bringing prominent individuals from the past into the present. After failing with notable scientists like Archimedes and Galileo, who are not adaptable enough to cope with 20th-century society, he tries retrieving William Shakespeare, who he hopes can understand human beings of any time. Shakespeare becomes ravenous to learn what posterity made of his work, so the professor enrolls him in a colleague's evening-extension class on Shakespeare, with less than stellar results.

Related Topics:
Isaac Asimov - The Immortal Bard - 1954 - Physics - Time travel - Archimedes - Galileo - 20th-century - William Shakespeare

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"God ha' mercy!" cries Asimov's Shakespeare. "What cannot be racked from words in five centuries? One could wring, methinks, a flood from a damp clout!"

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