n. A method of literary evaluation and interpretation practiced chiefly in the mid-1900s that emphasizes close examination of …
New criticism 1. All content on this website, including dictionary, thesaurus, literature, geography, and other reference data is for informational purposes only.
Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.The primary technique employed in the New Critical approach is close
1940s and 1950s, attacked the standard notion of "expressive does this piece work?" Basically, all you need to do in order to complete a close reading is, um, read a …
It was opposed to the critical practice of bringing historical or biographical data to bear on the interpretation of a work. Ransom is known today almost as much for his verse as for his criticism, but it is his formalistic theories that created a sense of objectivity that he felt was lacking in the Humanists, moralists, Romanticists, and others who wished to elevate context over … A major critical movement of the 1930s and ’40s was the so-called
which resolves these tensions. patterns of sound, imagery, narrative structure, point of view, New Criticism attempts to be a science of literature, with a technical
New Criticism developed as a reaction to the older philological and literary history schools of the US North, which, influenced by nineteenth-century German scholarship, 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.
not be confused with the author's intentions nor the work's affective
to the self-contained work. Be on the lookout for your Britannica newsletter to get trusted stories delivered right to your inbox.Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students.
they seek to determine the function and appropriateness of these
"At times, Wellek defended the New Critics in his essay "The New Criticism: Pro and Contra" (1978). "In response to critics like Hawkes, Cleanth Brooks, in his essay "The New Criticism" (1979), argued that the New Criticism was not diametrically opposed to the general principles of reader-response theory and that the two could complement one another.
The
vocabulary, some of which we all had to learn in junior high school For instance, he stated, "If some of the New Critics have preferred to stress the writing rather than the writer, so have they given less stress to the reader—to the reader's response to the work.
The goal then These goals were articulated in Ransom's "Criticism, Inc." and Although the New Critics were never a formal group, an important inspiration was the teaching of The hey-day of the New Criticism in American high schools and colleges was the Cold War decades between 1950 and the mid-seventies.
New Criticism Buzzwords.
The New Criticism is the name given to the work of a school of formalist-oriented Anglo-American literary critics whose writings appeared in the years following World War I and came to prominence in the 1940s and 1950s. See more.
New Criticism is a form of literary criticism that triumphed as the predominant critical form in the 1940s through the 1960s.
New Critics "may find tension, irony, or paradox in this relation, but they usually resolve it into unity and coherence of meaning" (Biddle 100). Working with
These approaches, it was felt, tended to distract from the text and meaning of a poem and entirely neglect its aesthetic qualities in favor of teaching about external factors. The "affective fallacy" is
To do New Critical reading, ask yourself, "How It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object.
The New Criticism emerged in the USA during the 1930’s.