New Criticism developed as a reaction to the older
philological and
literary history schools of
New England, which focused on the history and meaning of individual words and their relation to foreign and ancient languages, comparative sources, and the biographical circumstances of the authors, taking this approach under the influence of nineteenth-century German scholarship. The New Critics felt that this approach tended to distract from the text and meaning of a
poem and entirely neglect its
aesthetic qualities in favor of teaching about external factors. On the other hand, the New Critics disparaged the literary appreciation school, which limited itself to pointing out the "beauties" and morally elevating qualities of the text, as too subjective and emotional. Condemning this as a version of
Romanticism, they aimed for a newer, systematic and objective method. New Critics believed the structure and meaning of the text were intimately connected and should not be analyzed separately. In order to bring the focus of literary studies back to analysis of the texts, they aimed to exclude the reader's response, the author's intention, historical and cultural contexts, and moralistic bias from their analysis. These goals were articulated in Ransom's "Criticism, Inc." and
Allen Tate's "Miss Emily and the Bibliographer". Close reading (or
explication de texte) was a staple of French literary studies, but in the United States, aesthetic concerns and the study of modern poets were the province of non-academic essayists and book reviewers rather than serious scholars. The New Criticism changed this. Though their interest in textual study initially met with resistance from older scholars, the methods of the New Critics rapidly predominated in American universities until challenged by
structuralism and
post-structuralism in the 1960s and 1970s. Other schools of critical theory including,
feminist literary criticism,
deconstructionist theory, the
New Historicism, and
reception theory followed. Although the New Critics were never a formal group, an important inspiration was the teaching of
John Crowe Ransom of
Kenyon College, whose students (all Southerners),
Allen Tate,
Cleanth Brooks, and
Robert Penn Warren would go on to develop the aesthetics that came to be known as the New Criticism. Indeed, for Paul Lauter, a professor of American Studies at
Trinity College, New Criticism is a reemergence of the
Southern Agrarians. In his essay, "The New Criticism", Cleanth Brooks notes that "The New Critic, like the
Snark, is a very elusive beast", meaning that there was no clearly defined "New Critical" manifesto, school, or stance. Nevertheless, a number of writings outline inter-related New Critical ideas. In 1946,
William K. Wimsatt and
Monroe Beardsley published a classic and controversial New Critical essay entitled "
The Intentional Fallacy", in which they argued strongly against the relevance of an
author's intention, or "intended meaning" in the analysis of a literary work. For Wimsatt and Beardsley, the words on the page were all that mattered; importation of meanings from outside the text was considered irrelevant, and potentially distracting. In another essay, "
The Affective Fallacy", which served as a kind of sister essay to "The Intentional Fallacy" Wimsatt and Beardsley also discounted the reader's personal/emotional reaction to a literary work as a valid means of analyzing a text. This fallacy would later be repudiated by theorists from the
reader-response school of literary theory. One of the leading theorists from this school,
Stanley Fish, was himself trained by New Critics. Fish criticizes Wimsatt and Beardsley in his essay "Literature in the Reader" (1970). The hey-day of the New Criticism in American high schools and colleges was the Cold War decades between 1950 and the mid-seventies. Brooks and Warren's
Understanding Poetry and
Understanding Fiction both became staples during this era. Studying a passage of prose or poetry in New Critical style required careful, exacting scrutiny of the passage itself. Formal elements such as
rhyme, meter,
setting,
characterization, and plot were used to identify the
theme of the text. In addition to the theme, the New Critics also looked for
paradox,
ambiguity,
irony, and
tension to help establish the single best and most unified interpretation of the text. Although the New Criticism is no longer a dominant theoretical model in American universities, some of its methods (like
close reading) are still fundamental tools of literary criticism, underpinning a number of subsequent theoretic approaches to literature including poststructuralism, deconstruction theory,
New Testament narrative criticism, and
reader-response theory. It has been credited with anticipating the insights of the
linguistic turn and for showing significant ideological and historical parallels with
logical positivism. ==Criticism==