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