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New Criticism was the dominant trend in English and American literary criticism of the early twentieth century, from the 1920s to the early 1960s. Its adherents were emphatic in their advocacy of close reading and attention to texts themselves, and their rejection of criticism based on extra-textual sources, especially biography. Their readings were brilliant, articulately argued, and broad in scope, but sometimes idiosyncratic and moralistic.1 The New Critics
Among the best-known figures associated with the New Criticism are:
- T.S. Eliot
- F.R. Leavis
- I.A. Richards
- W.K. Wimsatt
- Monroe Beardsley
- William Empson
- Robert Penn Warren
- John Crowe RansomJohn Crowe Ransom ( April 30, 1888 July 3, 1974) was an United States poet, essayist, and social commentator. John Crowe Ransom was born in Pulaski, Tennessee. He was the son of a Methodist minister. At age fifteen, Ransom entered Vanderbilt University in
- Cleanth BrooksCleanth Brooks ( 1906- 1994) was an influential American literary critic. He was eminent among the New Critics of the mid- twentieth century, and is still remembered as an extremely attentive reader. Brooks described inattentive, summary reading of poetry
2 Key concepts
- The intentional fallacy: Wimsatt and Beardsley's essay of the same name argued strongly against any discussion of an author's "intention" or "intended meaning." For the New Critics, the words on the page were all that mattered; importation of meanings from outside the text was quite irrelevant, and potentially distracting.
- Ambiguity: Several of the New Critics were enamored above all else of ambiguityA word, phrase, sentence, or other communication is called ambiguous if it can be reasonably interpreted in more than one way. The simplest case is a single word with more than one sense: The word "bank", for example, can mean "financial institution", "ed and multiple simultaneous meanings. In the 1930sCenturies: 19th century 20th century 21st century Decades: 1880s 1890s 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s Years: 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 Events and trends Technology Jet engine invented Link Trainer invented Sc, Richards presciently borrowed Sigmund FreudSigmund Freud ( May 6, 1856 September 23, 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of the psychoanalytic school of psychology, a movement that popularized the theory that unconscious motives control much behavior. He became interested in hypnotis's term " overdeterminationOverdetermination the idea that a single observed effect is determined by multiple causes at once (any one of which alone might be enough to account for the effect), was originally a key concept of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis. For Freud and Psychoanaly" (which would later be revived in Marxist political theory by Louis Althusser) to refer to the multiple determining meanings which he believed were always simultaneously present in language; he called the opposing argument "the One And Only One True Meaning Superstition" (The Philosophy of Rhetoric, 39).
- many more key words and ideas could be added here.
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