New Criticism was a dominant literary theory and critical movement in the mid-20th century, especially in the United States. It emphasized close reading of the text itself—its structure, imagery, language, and form—while rejecting the importance of authorial intent, historical context, and reader response.
Key figures associated with New Criticism include:
Allen Tate – A major proponent of New Criticism, he focused on the formal aspects of poetry and argued for autonomous interpretation of texts.
Robert Penn Warren – A founding figure, co-author of Understanding Poetry with Brooks, which was a cornerstone textbook of New Criticism.
Cleanth Brooks – Another founding member, most famous for The Well Wrought Urn and also co-author of Understanding Poetry. He developed the concept of the "heresy of paraphrase."
Why Claude Lévi-Strauss Is Not a New Critic:
Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist and structuralist, not a literary critic in the New Critical tradition. His primary focus was on:
Structuralism – analyzing the underlying structures of myths, cultures, and languages.
His key works like The Raw and the Cooked and Structural Anthropology examine mythologies and cultural systems, not literary form or poetic structure in the way New Critics did.
Year-wise PYQs
