Rereading the New Criticism
By: Edited by Miranda B. Hickman and John D. McIntyre
Publisher: Ohio State University Press; Ohio State Univ Pr (Trd)
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Columbus
Language: eng
Number of pages: 255
ISBN-13: 9780814211809; 9780814292792
Subjects: New Criticism
Description: "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."--Publisher's description.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Aesthetics as ethics : one and a half theses on the New Criticism / Robert Archambeau; title: Eliot, the Agrarians, and the political subtext of New Critical formalism / Alastair Morrison; title: Androgyny and social upheaval : the gendered pretext of John Crowe Ransom's New Critical approach / Aaron Shaheen; title: The fugitive and the exile : Theodor W. Adorno, John Crowe Ransom, and The Kenyon review / James Matthew Wilson; title: No two ways about it : William Empson's enabling ambiguities / Bradley D. Clissold; title: In pursuit of understanding : Louis Untermeyer, Brooks and Warren, and "The red wheelbarrow" / Connor Byrne; title: Through fields of cacophonous modern masters : James Baldwin and New Critical modernism / Adam Hammond; title: "Disagreeable intellectual distance" : theory and politics in the old regionalism of the New Critics / Alexander MacLeod; title: Teaching with style : Brooks and Warren's literary pedagogy / Tara Lockhart; title: "A kind of dual attentiveness" : close reading after the New Criticism / Cecily Devereux.