Towards A Historical Aspect Of The New Criticism

As a critical genre that appeared in the early twentieth century and declined in the late 1950s, the New Criticism dominates the classroom of American universities for almost forty years. Rejecting the previous schools of criticism, especially social and impressive criticisms, the New Criticism pays more attention towards the literary text. Some people say that the theories of the New Criticism can be summarized as a method of close reading and emphasis on the text. Yet that is not all the New Criticism about.The New Criticism analyzes the texture of the text, how it is constructed and how it functions. The text must be scrutinized in close details to understand how it is structured and to determine how well it matches with a specific genre. In the New Criticism every text is independent. Each single text is considered to have its own central unity. The author's intentions and the reader's previous experiences are irrelevant to the new critics.Several poets and scholars join the group of the New Criticism and contribute their own theories that enrich the theory bank of the New Criticism. The precursors of the New Criticism are T. S. Eliot and I. A. Richards. The former promotes the theory of"impersonality"that concerns about the relationships between tradition and the individual and that between poem and poet. He believes that poetry is an"escape of emotion"and critics should find an"objective correlative"to elucidate stanzas. The latter tries to distinguish emotive language and referential language. The two figures pave the way for the peak period of the New Criticism when John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren perform their roles. The 1930s and 1940s witness the practical operation of new critical methods. It is the period when most of the methodologies of the New Criticism come into being---ontology, tension, irony, paradox, impure poetry so on and so forth. The scholars in universities and students of English show unprecedented interest in the form and language of literature. In the late stage of the New Criticism, professors like RenéWellek and William Wimsatt were engrossed in the theories and summarization of the New Criticism. The books on history of modern criticism and articles on"intentional"and"affective"fallacies are the major achievements of this period. The theories of the New Criticism have never been apart from its applications. Therefore, in the third chapter of this thesis, some examples are...