Meaning of New Criticism | Babel Free

Definitions

A movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle of the 20th century, emphasizing close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work functions as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object.

Examples

“It is not just these works that are to be explicated as texts, it is the workings of a political and literary culture that can strengthen the present. For this point of view, Matthiessen was attacked. In the heyday of formalist New Criticism, itself a way of going about the study of literature that could only serve the interests of depoliticizing public culture, any wider interests in the interrelation of the work to society and times and the most fundamental provisions of the history of ideas are all to be expunged.”

“One could argue that it is precisely this lack of self-awareness or self-reflexivity that so easily renders environmentalists the butt of jokes, that makes them "vulnerable," to use that language of New Criticism.”

CEFR level