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9 - The Southern New Critics

from THE NEW CRITICS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Mark Jancovich
Edited by
A. Walton Litz ,
Louis Menand  and
Lawrence Rainey
A. Walton Litz
Affiliation:
Princeton University, New Jersey
Louis Menand
Affiliation:
Columbia University, New York
Lawrence Rainey
Affiliation:
University of York
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Summary

Contemporary criticism tends to dismiss the New Criticism as a type of asocial formalism. The New Critics, it is claimed, disconnected the literary text from its social and historical context and were solely concerned with the practice of close reading. As Terry Eagleton has put it, close reading did ‘more than insist on due attentiveness to the text. It inescapably suggests an attention to this rather than to something else: to the “words on the page” rather than the context which produced and surrounded them.’

However, nothing could be further from the spirit of the New Criticism as a movement than this description. The figures who promoted and established the New Criticism as a mode of literary analysis were anything but asocial formalists, at least not in the ways that Eagleton and others define this term. Indeed the central preoccupation, and even the principal motivation, of those who championed the New Criticism was a concern with the condition of culture and society within twentieth-century America, and it was in order to disseminate their criticism of that condition that they developed and promoted the New Criticism as a mode of study. Through that development the New Criticism established the basis for later modes of academic literary criticism, altering, as it did, the definition of literary studies within the academy. It was the New Criticism which shifted the dominant forms of academic study from philology, source-hunting, and literary biography to textual analysis, literary theory, and what is now understood as ‘literary analysis’.

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The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism , pp. 200 - 218
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2000

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