New Criticism was the dominant trend in English and Americanliterary 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, the "New Critics" readings were brilliant, articulately argued, and broad in scope, but sometimes they were idiosyncratic and moralistic.
The intentional fallacy: Wimsatt and Beardsley's essay of the same name argued strongly against any discussion of an author's "intention" or "intended meaning." For the New Critics, the words on the page were all that mattered; importation of meanings from outside the text was quite irrelevant, and potentially distracting.
Ambiguity: Several of the New Critics were enamored above all else of ambiguity and multiple simultaneous meanings. In the 1930s, Richards presciently borrowed Sigmund Freud's term "overdetermination" (which would later be revived in Marxistpolitical theory by Louis Althusser) to refer to the multiple determining meanings which he believed were always simultaneously present in language; he called the opposing argument "the One And Only One True Meaning Superstition" (The Philosophy of Rhetoric, 39).
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."
NewCriticism was the dominant trend in English and American literary criticism of the early twentieth century, from the 1920s to the early 1960s.
The NewCriticism 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.
Recent developments in the field of critical literature theory have shown that NewCriticism is far too narrow in its scope to allow for proper development of thought, and has been discontinued by academic societies in favor of more prominent theories, such as Deconstruction Theory or Freudian Psychoanalytic criticism.
The literary criticism of the Renaissance developed classical ideas of unity of form and content into a literary neoclassicism which proclaimed literature to be central to culture and entrusted the poet or author with the preservation of a long literary tradition.
Early in the century the school of criticism known as Russian Formalism, and slightly later the NewCriticism in Britain and America, came to dominate the study and discussion of literature.
Some critics work largely with theoretical texts, while others read traditional literature; interest in the literary canon is still great, but many critics are also interested in minority and women's literatures, while some critics influenced by cultural studies read popular texts like comic books or pulp/genre fiction.
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