In this essay I introduce the founders of New Criticism, describe the theoretical origin of the movement, and describe three commonalities among New Critics.
The term New Criticism was established after the publication of John Crowe Ransom's The New Criticism in 1941. It was applied to a theory and practice that was prominent in American literary criticism until late in the 1960's. The movement derived from elements in I. A. Richards' Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and Practical Criticism (1929) and from the critical essays of T. S. Eliot. In his book Ransom opposes the use of biographical information, the placement of a work in its social context, and the reference to literary history when interpreting a work. Instead, he insists that the proper concern of a literary critic is his/her consideration of a work as an independent entity. Notable critics in this mode were the southerners Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, whose textbooks Understanding Poetry (1938) and Understanding Fiction (1943) did much to make New Criticism the predominant method of teaching literature in American colleges and some high schools until the 1970's.
The term New Criticism was established after the publication of John Crowe Ransom's The New Criticism in 1941. It was applied to a theory and practice that was prominent in American literary criticism until late in the 1960's. The movement derived from elements in I. A. Richards' Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and Practical Criticism (1929) and from the critical essays of T. S. Eliot. In his book Ransom opposes the use of biographical information, the placement of a work in its social context, and the reference to literary history when interpreting a work. Instead, he insists that the proper concern of a literary critic is his/her consideration of a work as an independent entity. Notable critics in this mode were the southerners Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, whose textbooks Understanding Poetry (1938) and Understanding Fiction (1943) did much to make New Criticism the predominant method of teaching literature in American colleges and some high schools until the 1970's.
Although New Critics differ from one another in many ways, the following points of view and procedures are common to many of them. First, a poem, for example, is a poem and not another thing. A New Critic does not adopt a critical practice that may divert his/her attention from the poem itself. When analyzing and evaluating a particular work, a New Critic ignores the biography and temperament of the author, the social conditions at the time of production, the psychological and moral effects the work has on him/her, and literary history (with respect to the work's form and subject matter).
Because of its critical focus on literary works in isolation from their attendant circumstances and effects, New Criticism is a type of critical formalism. That type of formalism derives from the aesthetic philosophy of Immanuel Kant. According to Kant, aesthetics concerns beauty, not truth or morality. "Beauty" refers to the internal order of an object, not its function. In other words, an aesthetic object has its own mode of being which separates it from the utilitarian considerations that inform our relationships to other human constructs. The early New Critics preserved much of Kant's aesthetics, isolating literary knowledge from scientific knowledge and consigning literary truth to the internal world of a work.
The second commonality among New Critics is that they oppose literary truth both to the experimental truth of science and to the truth of everyday conversation. Literature is a special kind of language and the explicative procedure is to analyze the meanings and interactions of words, figures of speech, and symbols. New Critics emphasize the organic unity of overall structure and verbal meanings. Do not separate the structure from the meanings.
Third, the distinctive procedure of a New Critic is explication or close reading: the thorough analysis of the complex interrelations and ambiguities (multiple meanings) of the verbal and figurative components within a work.
Finally, the distinction between literary genres does not have an essential role in New Criticism. The essential components of any work of literature--lyric, narrative or dramatic--are words, images and symbols rather than characters, thoughts and plot. Such linguistic elements create tension, irony and paradox--revealing a humanly significant theme (a reconciliation of diverse impulses or a stabilization of oppositional forces). New Critics consider the form of a work as a structure of meanings that unify through the play and counterplay of thematic imagery and symbolic action.
