New Criticism (Formalism) e New Criticism was the movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism throughout the mid 2oth century. e It was developed as a response to older schools of criticism that examined things like history, language, culture and the author's life to glean meaning from literary works.Focus on the text structure New critics focused on the link between the structure of a text and its meaning. ¢ They wished to do away with reader response, and considerations of a work’s cultural and historical context. For the New Critics, there is only the text; everything we bring from the outside is irrelevant. High quality texts should be timeless and universal (apolitical). New Criticism focuses on the close reading of a text, especially of poetry, to uncover how a work of literature functions as “a self- contained, self-referential” piece of art.Important figures in the movement: ig John Crowe Ransom--The New Criticism. (1941) {Vanderbilt University} (where the movement got its name) (Tennessee) Cleanth Brooks~The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947) and Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939) Brooks helped to formulate formalist criticism, focusing on what he called “the interior life of a poem’ (Leitch 2001). He was instrumental in organizing the principles of close reading. {Southerner from Kentucky, also taught at Vanderbilt} Robert Penn Warren--American poet & literary critic (also at Vanderbilt and from Kentucky) Founded The Southern Review with Brooks LA. Richards—Practical Criticism, and The Meaning of Meaning (Claimed to offer a “scientific approach” to literature) {British} He actually studied philosophy at Cambridge, not literature.T. S. Eliot Essays: "Tradition and the Individual Talent" "Hamlet and His Problems" (Accused Shakespeare of underdeveloping the motivations behind Hamlet's emotional response in the play) “He developed the idea of the "objective correlative,” which refers toa symbolic article used “to give explicit, rather than implicit, access” to abstract concepts like emotion or color. (In other words, he believed writers should show rather than describe emotion) “He believed poetry should remain “impersonal”ene Critics Critics of the movement felt that it took a far too narrow and apolitical approach to text. In the second half of the 20th century, its central place in American literary criticism was usurped by New Historicist, Marxist, Feminist, and later Postcolonial and Queer literary theories.