New Criticism is an American critical movement

New Criticism is an American critical movement which began in the 1930s and played an

important role in American literary criticism until the end of 1960s. Some English critics had tremendous influence over it. The literary criticism of T.S.Eliot and I.A Richard’s Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) andPractical Criticism (1929) were crucial. Eliot’s redefinition of tradition in his essay “Tradition and Individual Talent”, his making of the critical concepts like “objective correlative,” his reassessment of Jacobean and Metaphysical Poetry had an important

influence on New criticism.

The term New Criticism was coined by Joe Elias Spingarn in 1910 in protest against the pedantry of the American academic scene. John Crowe Ransom’s essay “Criticism Inc.” published

in 1937 gave the literary movement an identity.    According to him criticism should become more

scientific or precise and systematic.

Ransom’s book The New Criticism.

However the movement got its name from John Crowe This book was published in 1941. Cleanth Brooks’ and

Robert Penn Warren’s text books Understanding Poetry (1938) and Understanding Fiction (1943)

greatly helped New Criticism to become the then current method of teaching literature in American

Colleges  for  the  next  two  or  three  decades.     Other  important  New  Critics  are  Allen  Tate,

R.P.Blackmur and William K.  Wimsatt.

The following are some of the important features of New Criticism.

1.       They considered a poem or a literary work in isolation, as a self contained object. That is, they regarded a poem as an independent and self sufficient verbal object. The first law of criticism according to John Crowe Ransom is that it should be objective. In analyzing and evaluating a literary work they were not concerned with the biography of the author, the historical conditions at the time of the making of the work or its emotional effects upon the reader.

2.       The procedure that the New Critics followed is explication or close reading. This means the detailed and subtle analysis of the complex relationships and multiple meanings of the elements inside a work.

3.       New Critics viewed literature as a special kind of language which is directly opposite to the language of science and other practical subjects. Their explicative procedure is to analyze meanings and interactions of words, figures of speech and symbols.

4.       The difference between various types of literature (genres), though recognized, has no important role in New Criticism. The essential elements of any literary work are words, images and

symbols rather than character, thought, and plot, irrespective of which genre it belongs to. In his essay of 1951 “The Formalist Critic” Cleanth Brooks asserted that “form is meaning.”