New Criticism Analysis

1363 Words6 Pages
Discussion: It is generally supposed that New Criticism is a specifically American movement, and it is forgotten that in England I.A. Richards and T.S. Eliot were its pioneers. Richards provided the theoretical basis for the technique of verbal analysis of the New School. The term New Criticism was first used by Joel E. Spingarn in an address at Columbia University on, “The New Criticism,” and the address itself may be regarded as the manifesto of the New Criticism. However, the term came into general use after John Crowe Ransom, a great American critic, published his The New Criticism in 1941, in which he studied four great contemporary critics and made a forceful plea for Ontological criticisms. Ransom, as a matter of fact, is the key figure…show more content…
First, there was widespread dissatisfaction, both in England and America, with the contemporary literary situation. There was rapid scientific development and significant social change, but literature and literary criticism were stagnant. Victorian prudery and the old-fashioned concerns with moral and social values came to be regarded as obstacles in the way of literary and critical development. Writers desired earnestly a positive approach to literary problems. Allied to this desire was the revolt, in nearly all critical camps, against academic over-emphasis upon the background and environment of literature and concentration upon the author instead of the work. Dissatisfaction with old, naturally led to thinking along new lines, and thus were sown the seeds of the New…show more content…
Eliot wielded a great deal of influence among the contemporaries. When his The Sacred Wood (1920) came out, it started a trend in criticism, mainly descriptive then, which came to be called New Criticism. The term was put into circulation by Joel E. Spingarn, and all its major practitioners have been either English or American. Spingarn is an authoritative historian of Renaissance criticism. He explained the theories of Croce in a booklet called The New Criticism in 1911, and later, in 1941, the poet John Crowe Ransom, the founder of Kenyon Review, wrote a book, reviewing the criticism of I.A. Richards, T.S. Eliot and Yvor Winters, rather disparagingly, to which he gave the title The New Criticism (1941). This title has now come to stay. In Ransom’s book, there is an essay Wanted: an Ontological Critic, where he pleads for an establishment of an intellectual movement that deserves to be named New Criticism. Ransom makes a formal
Open Document