The New Criticism was a formalist style of literary criticism that emerged in the first half of the 20th century. It viewed texts as self-contained and focused on analyzing elements within the text like irony, ambiguity, and paradox to discover implied themes. Key figures in developing New Criticism included I.A. Richards, William Empson, and T.S. Eliot. The approach was popularized through works by Cleanth Brooks and others in the 1940s-1950s. New Criticism emphasized close reading of texts over historical context or authorial intent.

1. Name given to a style of criticism
advocated by a group of academics
writing in the first half of the 20th
century.

2. The New Criticism is a type of formalist literary
criticism that reached its height during the
1940 s and 1950s and that received its name
from John Crowe Ransom’s 1941 book The
New Criticism.

3.  The criticism of t s Eliot
 Theories of I A Richards
 Practice of William Empson

4.  texts as autonomous and “closed,”
meaning that everything that is needed
to understand a work is present within
it.The reader does not need outside
sources, such as the author’s biography,
to fully understand a text.

5.  Extrinsic analysis—
historical/biographical
 Moral and philosophical --New humanist
 Impressionist critics ,expressive school

6. I A Richards
(Practical Criticism)
William Empson
(SevenTypes of Ambiguity)
T S Eliot
“ HamletAnd His Problems”
“Traditional andThe IndividualTalent”

7.  Cleanth Brooks
 R.P. Blackmur
 Robert PennWarren
 W.K.Wimsat

8.  author's intention ,biographical fallacy
,genetic fallacy, reader's affective response
impressionism ,relativism ,paraphrase
heresy of paraphrase, poem as artifact vs.
poem as meaning

9.  Irony ,ambiguity, paradox ,denotation,
implication (vs. inference), connotation
 image symbol (image with literal and
figurative meaning)
 metaphor or simile (image with only
figurative meaning

10.  irony, ambiguity, and paradox are only a few
of the poetic figures which a New Critical
reading might discover implying thematic
connotations implied in a poem , but in the
early history of New Criticism, they were the
most commonly discovered strategies by
which poems resolved their ‘tensions into
themes of universal significance’

11.  From parts to an organic whole
1. finding the tensions and conflicts, ambiguity,
paradox, irony
2. connotation and denotations
3. poetic elements: metaphor, simile,
personification, prosody,
4. narrative elements: tone, point of view,
narrative structure

12.  1.Textuality rather than text; placing the text
back in its context

2. seeing the author and reader as
conditioned subject, but not godlike
"creator" able to transcend their
socio-historical conditions

3. seeing gaps, but not totality out of the
text; challenging the text

13.  IA Richard's Practical Criticism: A Study of
LiteraryJudgement (1929).
 Cleanth Brooks's TheWellWrought Urn (1947).
 Michael Schmidt and Grevel Lindop‘ s British
Poetry Since 1960 (1972).
 Calvin Bendient‘ s Eight Contemporary Poets
(1974).
 P.R. King's Nine Contemporary Poets: A Critical
Introduction (1979).
 Christopher Ricks‘ s The Force of Poetry (1987