New Critics believed the structure and meaning of the text were intimately connected and should not be analyzed separately. ", The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=New_Criticism&oldid=994665935, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, T.S. "[8] 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. 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. According to New Criticism, we should judge books the same way. However, Brooks tempers his praise for the reader-response theory by noting its limitations, pointing out that, "to put meaning and valuation of a literary work at the mercy of any and every individual [reader] would reduce the study of literature to reader psychology and to the history of taste. This contains Ransom’s personal analysis of several of … The theory rose to prominence in literary studies from 1940s through the 1960s and has since left an enduring influence on the way we read and write about literature. New Criticism, in simple terms, is a critical movement that propagates the idea of ‘art for art’s sake’.” In focusing on the text itself (“close reading“), New Critics intentionally ignore the author, the reader, and the social context. You know, who doesn't love the irony, the misunderstandings, and the marriage plots? It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object. Fish criticizes Wimsatt and Beardsley in his essay "Literature in the Reader" (1970).[6]. Indeed, for Paul Lauter, a Professor of American Studies at Trinity College, New Criticism is a reemergence of the Southern Agrarians. New Criticism. An “essay” is literally an attempt at describing something, and in this book, Frye offers four theories that attempt to define categories of literature and keywords for doing literary criticism. So, even if we’re reading a book by a renowned author like Shakespeare, we shouldn’t let the author’s reputation taint our evaluation of the text. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays is Northrop Frye’s masterful 1957 book that presents principles of literary criticism by drawing upon a wide survey of Western literature from Homer to Joyce. Even if we did determine the author’s intentions, they don’t matter, because the text itself carries its own value. The term ‘New Criticism’ came to be applied as a literary theory after the publication of John Crowe Ransom’s ‘The New Criticism’ in 1941. Instead, the objective determination as to "how a piece works" can be found through close focus and analysis, rather than through extraneous and erudite special knowledge. What is New Historicism New historicism theory – an explanation. Its implicit claim to authority is not based on a lifetime’s creative work or a prestigious commission but, riskily, on the skill and argument of the poem alone. New Criticism coined by John Crowe Ransom’s The New Criticism in 1941, came to be applied to theory and practice that was prominent in American literary criticism until late in t… Intentional Fallacy, a literary term, is coined by the American New Critics W. K. Wimsatt Jr and Monroe C. Beardsley to describe the general assumption that an author’s assumed or declared intention in writing a work is an appropriate basis for deciding upon the meaning or value of a work. New Criticism, in simple terms, is a critical movement that propagates the idea of ‘art for art’s sake’.” In focusing on the text itself (“close reading“), New Critics intentionally ignore the author, the reader, and the social context. The movement derived its name from John Crowe Ransom's 1941 book The New Criticism. New Criticism, in simple terms, is a critical movement that propagates the idea of ‘art for art’s sake’.” In focusing on the text itself (“close reading“), New Critics intentionally ignore the author, the reader, and the social context. 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. 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