Rereading the New Criticism ed. by Miranda B. Hickman and John D. McIntyre (review)

This collection of ten essays, plus editorial commentary, offers to clear the “atmosphere of misprision and cultural forgetting” suffered by the New Criticism, once so dominant and later so reviled as elitist and ahistorical. Its aim is not to reinstate the school but to promote a “new formalism,” a “historically informed formalist criticism” that might profitably adapt New Critical methods, especially close reading, to current cultural theory. Today, when theory has lost some of its most influential scholars, and when the status of “what used to be called literature” is in doubt, we again need disciplined ways of recognizing what, if anything, is literary about literature.

New Criticism is as famous for what it excluded as misleading (biography, intent, politics, social background, moral judgment, emotional impressions, paraphrase) as for the rigorous stylistic analysis that it extolled. Perhaps its greatest claim was that a distinct mode of poetic thinking marshals the waywardness of paradox, irony, tension, and ambiguity to yield a unified, shared understanding of a text. Although some contributors to this volume believe the New Critics have been misunderstood or were, for one contributor here, “far ahead of their time,” the effect of the book as a whole is to give historical and biographical depth to familiar judgments about them. It is no surprise to learn that New Criticism arose when well-educated, nostalgic, politically defensive scholars in the agrarian American South abandoned regional loyalty for a purified aesthetic devoted to textual complexity in the service of organic unity. Or to learn that their political conservatism and distaste for modern culture – even, in some cases, their racism – continued to lurk in their aesthetic judgments. Or that they revered T.S. Eliot, whose modernist style provided a sophisticated way of condemning modern instrumental and commercial thinking. Or that they did not agree on everything. Or that their emphasis on precise reading of lyric poetry dominated English departments for three decades, until their regal values (autonomy, integrity, intensity, disinterestedness) were dethroned by critics who employed similar methods to unpack the ideological baggage concealed by those same values. Although close scrutiny of “the words on the page” was condemned for diverting attention from a more perceptive “ideologically situated critique,” in fact all the theories that rebuked New Criticism benefited from its example of deft rhetorical analysis.

Several of these carefully researched essays examine the careers of the major American critics: John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, Arnold Davidson. Just why and how they transformed regional piety into such a refined, formalist aesthetic is a mystery that haunts this volume and invites biographical attention. Some attention is paid to outsiders like William Empson and Theodor Adorno, but little to other schools of modern formalism. For the most part the studies are remarkably accommodating, as they demonstrate – to gallop through the list – that New Criticism is not truly ahistorical, or anti-romantic, or divorced from ethical judgments, or unresponsive to political events, or irrelevant for writers like James Baldwin, or even blind to gender, at least to androgyny, which was attractive as a model of poetic sensibility, though unthinkable in the flesh. All of these concerns can be woven into the texture of a literary work, at least when read properly by an adept critic. After these respectful claims, it is refreshing to encounter a final, spirited attack by Cecily Devereux, who contends that despite its genteel defence of the humanities, New Criticism’s real purpose was to enforce a patriarchal discipline that “foundationally and pervasively reproduced a system of social and political inequity” in the academy at the expense of women and ethnic and racial groups. That it succeeded so well testifies to its stifling authority. As these essays also show, however, it succeeded because it worked so well. Both theoretically and practically, it dignified literary and critical discourses at a time when they seemed irrelevant. It devised an effective pedagogy, provided helpful textbooks, taught by patient example...