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criticism before 1978 was is not recent. That was 35 years ago. |
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New Critics focused on the text of a work of literature and tried to exclude the reader's response, the author's intention, historical and cultural contexts, and moralistic bias from their analysis. Their aesthetic concerns were initially outlined in essays like Ransom's "Criticism, Inc." and [[Allen Tate]]'s "Miss Emily and the Bibliographers."
New Critics often performed a "close reading" of the text and believed the structure and meaning of the text were intimately connected and should not be analyzed separately rather than analyzing the literary text itself. Before the New Criticsm became popular, Heather Dubrow notes that the prevailing focus of literary scholarship was on "the study of ethical values and philosophical issues through literature, the tracing of literary history, and . . . political criticism," and literary scholarship did not focus on analysis of texts.<ref>Dubrow, Heather. "Twentieth Century Shakespeare Criticism." ''The Riverside Shakespeare''. Houghton Mifflin, 1997. </ref> At that time, close readings (or ''explication de texte'') were considered the work of non-academic "critics" (or book reviewers) and not the work of serious scholars.{{citation needed]] But the New Criticism changed this. Though their interest in textual study initially met with heavy resistance from the establishment, the practice eventually gained a foothold and soon became one of the central methods of literary scholarship in American universities until it fell out of favor in the 1970s as [[post-structuralism]], [[Deconstruction|deconstructionist theory]], and a plethora of other competing theoretical models vied for more attention in literary studies.
The New Criticism was never a formal collective, but it initially developed from the teaching methods advocated by [[John Crowe Ransom]] who taught at Vanderbilt. Some of his students (all Southerners) like [[Allen Tate]], [[Cleanth Brooks]], and [[Robert Penn Warren]] would go on to develop the aesthetics that came to be known as the New Criticism. Nevertheless, in his essay, "The New Criticism," Cleanth Brooks notes that "The New Critic, like the [[Snark (Lewis Carroll)|Snark]], is a very elusive beast," meaning that there was no clearly defined "New Critical" school or critical stance.<ref>Brooks, Cleanth. "The New Criticism." ''The Sewanee Review'' 87: 4 (1979): 592.</ref> Also, although there are a number of classic New Critical writings that outline inter-related ideas, there is no New Critical manifesto.
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==Criticism==
One of the most common grievances against the New Criticism, iterated in numerous ways, is an objection to the idea of the text as autonomous; detractors react against a perceived anti-[[historicism]], accusing the New Critics of divorcing literature from its
Indicative of the reader-response school of theory, Terence Hawkes writes that the fundamental close reading technique is based on the assumption that “the subject and the object of study—the reader and the text—are stable and independent forms, rather than products of the unconscious process of signification," an assumption which he identifies as the "ideology of liberal humanism,” which is attributed to the New Critics who are “accused of attempting to disguise the interests at work in their critical processes.”<ref name="Jancovich"/> For Hawkes, ideally, a critic ought to be considered to “[create] the finished work by his reading of it, and [not to] remain simply an inert consumer of a ‘ready-made’ product.”<ref name="Jancovich"/>
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Another objection to the New Criticism is that it is thought to aim at making criticism scientific, or at least “bringing literary study to a condition rivaling that of science.”<ref name="Wellek"/> However, [[René Wellek]] points out the erroneous nature of this criticism by noting that a number of the New Critics outlined their theoretical aesthetics in stark contrast to the "objectivity" of the sciences (though it should be noted that Ransom, in his essay "Criticism, Inc." did advocate that "criticism must become more scientific, or precise and systematic").<ref name="Wellek"/><ref>Ransom, John Crowe. "Criticism, Inc." ''[[The Virginia Quarterly Review]]'', Autumn 1937.</ref>
Wellek
==Important texts==
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