New Criticism

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New Criticism describes a literary critical and theoretical direction that is primarily found in the USA and to a lesser extent in England . It developed in the 1920s and was the defining way of looking at literature in the USA until the 1970s. The New Criticism got its name after the anthology The New Critics , which was published in 1941 by John Crowe Ransom .

The New Criticism was directed against the literary criticism that had prevailed since the 19th century, which was often limited to historical, philological and biographical details of the poetry or the poet. a. on Roland Barthes ' death of the author proclaimed in 1968 (compare also the so-called close reading ).

The New Critics opposed the assumption that every poem contained a “prose meaning” or even a moral which had to be salvaged from the poetry. Instead, they insisted on the importance of symbolic language as a means of knowledge and tried to find out "what the poem says as a poem" ( Cleanth Brooks ). Their analysis examined above all formal aspects of the poem and is related to the later structuralism with French influences, with which New Criticism went hand in hand since the 1950s.

The main proponents of New Criticism in the United States were John Crowe Ransom and many of his students at Vanderbilt University in Nashville after World War I, including Allen Tate , Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks . The literary journal The Kenyon Review ( ISSN  0163-075X ) was one of the most important mouthpieces .

Major exponents of New Criticism in Great Britain included William Empson and IA Richards .

New Criticism showed some parallels to the literary interpretation inherent in the work of the 1950s / 60s in the German-speaking area, as represented by Wolfgang Kayser and Emil Staiger , but differed from German German studies in its demand for exact methods, which consisted in understanding the creative spirit sought in the text with hermeneutic means.

Especially since the 1980s, critics have criticized the fact that the New Critics had torn the work of art completely out of its context. The New Historicism is, therefore, in response to the New Criticism and structuralism to understand the 1960s and 1970s.

literature

  • Ulrich Halfmann: The American "New Criticism." Athenaeum, Frankfurt am Main 1971.
  • Jürgen Klein, The beginnings of New Criticism in Irving Babbitt, TE Hulme and JE Spingarn ", in: Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft , Volume 28/1 (1983), pp. 94-122.
  • Mark Jancovich: The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism. Cambridge University Press 1993.
  • René Wellek : History of literary criticism. Volume 4.1: The English and American literary criticism 1900–1950. DeGruyter, Berlin and New York 1990.
  • Hubert Zapf : Brief History of Anglo-American Literary Theory. UTB, Stuttgart 1996.
  • Abrams, MH "New Criticism." A Glossary of Literary Terms. 7th ed. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1999. 180-182.
  • Biddle, Arthur W., and Toby Fulwiler. Reading, Writing, and the Study of Literature . NY: Random House, 1989.
  • Lynn, Steven. Texts and Contexts: Writing About Literature with Critical Theory . 2nd ed. NY: Longman, 1998.
  • Murfin, Ross, and Supryia M. Ray. The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms . Boston: Bedford Books, 1997.