New Criticism

English Proper noun New Criticism A movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle of the 20th century, emphasizing close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work functions as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object. en New Humanism en 13 Aug 83 11 5 Gay Community News 13 Denis M. Sweet A Scholar For Our Democracy It is not just these works that are to be explicated as texts, it is the workings of a political and literary culture that can strengthen the present. For this point of view, Matthiessen was attacked. In the heyday of formalist New Criticism, itself a way of going about the study of literature that could only serve the interests of depoliticizing public culture, any wider interests in the interrelation of the work to society and times and the most fundamental provisions of the history of ideas are all to be expunged. en 2018 Bad Environmentalism Nicole Seymour 14 One could argue that it is precisely this lack of self-awareness or self-reflexivity that so easily renders environmentalists the butt of jokes, that makes them "vulnerable," to use that language of New Criticism. Translations Chinese: Mandarin: cmn 新批評 Xīn Pīpíng en Literature