Rereading the New Criticism

by Miranda B. Hickman, John D. McIntyre

Overview

Committed to rigorous “close reading” and engagement with the “text itself” rather than information “extrinsic” to the text, John Crowe Ransom and a group of colleagues in the American South of the 1930s established a vanguard approach to literary criticism they called the “New Criticism.” By the 1940s, New Critical methods had become the dominant pedagogy in departments of English at colleges and universities across America, enjoying disciplinary hegemony until the late 1960s, when an influx of new theoretical work in literary studies left the New Criticism in shadow. Inspired by a range of new commentary reconsidering the New Criticism (from critics including Jane Gallop, Terry Eagleton, Charles Altieri, and Camille Paglia), the essays in Rereading the New Criticism reevaluate the New Critical corpus, trace its legacy, and explore resources it might offer for the future of theory, criticism, and pedagogy. Addressing the work of New Critics such as Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Penn Warren, as well as important forerunners of the New Critics such as I. A. Richards and William Empson, these ten essays shed new light on the genesis of the New Criticism and its significant contributions to the development of academic literary studies in North America; revisit its chief arguments and methods; interrogate received ideas about the movement; and consider how its theories and techniques might inform new methodologies for literary and cultural studies in the twenty-first century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814252369
Publisher:	Ohio State University Press
Publication date:	06/02/2015
Edition description:	1
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	(w) x (h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Miranda B. Hickman is associate professor of English at McGill University. John D. McIntyre is associate professor of English at the University of Prince Edward Island.

Table of Contents

Introduction—Rereading the New Criticism

Part I: Rereading the New Criticism

Chapter 1—Aesthetics as Ethics: One and a Half Theses on the New Criticism

Chapter 2—Eliot, the Agrarians, and the Political Subtext of New Critical Formalism

Chapter 3—Androgyny and Social Upheaval: The Gendered Pretext for John Crowe Ransom’s New Critical Approach

Chapter 4—The Fugitive and the Exile: Theodor W. Adorno, John Crowe Ransom, and The Kenyon Review

Part II: New Criticism and Modernism

Chapter 5—No Two Ways about It: William Empson’s Enabling Modernist Ambiguities

Chapter 6 —In Pursuit of Understanding: Louis Untermeyer, Brooks and Warren, and “The Red Wheelbarrow”

Chapter 7—Through Fields of Cacophonous Modern Masters: James Baldwin and New Critical Modernism

Part III: Legacy and Future Directions

Chapter 8—“Disagreeable Intellectual Distance”: Theory and Politics in the Old Regionalism of the New Critics

Chapter 9—Teaching with Style: Brooks and Warren’s Literary Pedagogy

Chapter 10—“A Kind of Dual Attentiveness”: Close Reading after the New Criticism

Epilogue—Toward a New Close Reading

Editorial Reviews

Rereading the New Criticism appears at an auspicious time in the continuing reevaluation of the history of literary criticism. This is a time of critical retrenchment, in which questions of form that have been ruled ‘out of court’ for some years now are returning with gathering force. This treatment of the New Critics is very timely, and should appeal to scholars of literary criticism, critics interested in the new questions of aesthetics and form, and to those looking for a useful teaching text for courses in literary criticism.” —Scott Klein, associate professor and English department chair, Wake Forest University

From the Publisher