In its time, the New Criticism was young, cool, and radical. (3)
The New Criticism was promoted as a corrective for the pedantries of early twentieth-century literary scholarship. But the practices of close reading themselves were promoted as a specifically pedagogic remedy for what were seen as the inadequacies of college students: young men (almost exclusively, we are speaking of the 1920s and 30s) who, in Brooks’s words, “actually approached Keats's Ode to a Nightingale in the same spirit and with the same expectations with which they approached an editorial in the local county newspaper or an advertisement in the current Sears, Roebuck catalogue.” (4)
Before the New Criticism, in the first quarter of the century, the study of literature consisted largely of the production, transmission and acquisition of facts about sets of texts. What one established as a scholar, imparted as a teacher, and learned as a student were commonly the names of historically important authors and some basic facts about their lives; the titles, publication dates and sources—especially classical--of their major works; relations of influence among them; and the readily observable features that distinguished forms, styles and genres (the medieval romance, the Petrarchan sonnet, the Jacobean drama, and so forth). One could say that, before the New Criticism, literary study was “distant reading” with a vengeance. With the work of the New Critics, it moved increasingly from filling library shelves with scholarly editions and literary histories to studying and describing how individual texts produced the effects that gave them historical importance or current interest. (5)
Against the historians and philologists, who treated literary texts as dusty achievements, the New Critics stressed literature as art. A poem, wrote Ransom, is a “living object.” As poets and wordsmiths themselves, they were interested in the craft of text-making. As men of letters (Cambridge, Vanderbilt, Yale), they were appreciators of aesthetic effects. Though close reading is often described as a method of interpretation, the New Critics—certainly the first generation of them--were concerned less with establishing the meaning of a text than with understanding its operative machinery. Indeed, a New-Critical “reading” was something like an exercise in reverse engineering: the examination of an artifact to see how it was made and how it worked. (5-6)
The “figure” or metaphor--literary studies as a business--would have been “distasteful” because literary academics understood that art and letters were remote from commerce. That shared understanding, and the shared antagonism to Big Business and Big Industry, created a bond and otherwise strange fellowship between the conservative southern poets and left-wing New York intellectuals who, in the 1940s and 50s, were the major advocates and practitioners of the New Criticism in the United States. (6)
Ransom, referring in the essay to the relation between historical scholarship and criticism, is clear about which should be up front and on top: “Behind appreciation . . . is historical scholarship. It is indispensable. But it is instrumental and cannot be the end itself. In this respect historical studies have the same standing as linguistic studies [that is, philology]: language and history are aids.” He also makes explicit the New Critics’ pedagogic mission: “The students of the future must be permitted to study literature, and not merely about literature. But I think this is what the good students have always wanted to do. The wonder is that they have allowed themselves so long to be denied.” (6)
By the late 1940s the hold of the old historicism had been effectively shaken, the literary academy was an increasingly lively place, and Bush could speak ruefully but accurately of the New Critics’ “tone of conscious superiority.” After chiding Ransom and others for gaffes reflecting their supposed ignorance of history, he goes on to charge them with leaving ordinary readers out in the cold: “The common reader might go so far as to think that poetry deals with life . . . . However valuable the processes and results of the new criticism, for some readers its preoccupation with technique, its aloof intellectuality, its fear of emotion and action, its avoidance of moral values, . . . all this suggests the dangers of a timid aestheticism.” Bush concludes his essay with a bit of table-turning: the charge--or, rather, countercharge--of scientism: “Since poetry does after all deal with experience, the most fastidious critics have to touch on it [;] yet they may give the impression that they are looking, not at human beings, but at specimens mounted on slides. Indeed, though the critics have censured scholarship for aping science, their own aims and methods seem much more deserving of the charge.” (8-9)
