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the Scrutiny circle of F.R. Leavis. It even produced pronounced ripples in the study of classical literature in the sixties.7 New Criticism, like Poststructuralism and Deconstruction, is a vague term, and perhaps better characterized as an approach to reading texts rather than a theoretical system of literary analysis. Its discernible principles had some roots at least in the critical work and modernist poetic practice of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. (Theories of the literary persona or the Image, for instance, which had served a number of critics well, despite their difficulties, can be traced back to Pound.8) In so far as the theory of the New Critics could be articulated, it stressed the autonomy of the work of art ("the well-wrought urn") with a rejection of biographical and historical explanations of its creation and value.9 It looked instead at imagery, paradox, ambiguity, irony, and poetic tension as the informing characteristics of the best poetry. |
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The literary values espoused by New Critics tended to elevate, or canonize, certain literary forms, the lyric, satire, and the novel, as opposed to epic or didactic poetry, and also certain authors such as the Metaphysical poets (as well as certain modernist poets like them) as opposed to the Romantics and Victorians. Despite the stress on formal aspects of poetry and narrative, the relationship of art to "life", a subtler form of the ancient insistence on the intimate link between art and morality, was smuggled back in the Southern agrarian values of some of the earlier New Critics, the conservative, almost religious, respect for tradition of those who followed T.S. Eliot, the insistent Puritan morality of Yvor Winters (notably in Maule's Curse), and the demands of the more secular Scrutiny group for an Arnoldian, "life-enhancing" dimension found embodied in the novels of Jane Austen, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and, latterly, D.H. Lawrence. |
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The New Criticism, however, as the dominant mode of literary analysis, was eventually challenged by Structuralist Poetics, which promised a science of literary interpretation through the investigation of the structures of |
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7 Most obviously seen in some of the contributions to the classical journal Arion, which began publication in 1961. For a retrospective survey of the New Criticism, see Willingham (1989) 24. For F.R. Leavis and his colleagues, see Mulhern (1979). As an approach to literature, New Criticism did not go unchallenged even in its own time. Opposition came from Chicago neo-Aristotelianism, which adopted an aggressive formalism based on older theories, stressing plot structure, motive, character and genre, as in e.g. Booth (1961), and from myth criticism, best exemplified by Frye (1957), which took in literature as just one aspect of its search for cultural archetypes. |
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8 See Elliott (1982) for a discussion of the history and difficulties of the concept of persona. |
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9 See, for example, the rejection of the Intentional and Affective Fallacies by W.K. Wimsatt in The Verbal Icon (1954) and of any non-textual concepts of "sincerity" or the intimate relationship of biographical information to the work of art. The best exposition of New Critical principles and objectives is Ransom (1941). For the empiricist underpinning of their implicit theory, see Berman (1988) 26. |
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