Facts about New Criticism Movement
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Wimsatt and Beardsley's 1946 essay The Affective Fallacy extended New Criticism by rejecting reader emotional responses as valid interpretive evidence, limiting validity to textual analysis alone.
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Yale University became a major institutional center for New Criticism when René Wellek and Austin Warren published Theory of Literature in 1949, systematizing the movement's critical principles.
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Paradox and ambiguity served as central analytical tools for New Critics, who valued the tension between multiple meanings within a single literary work rather than resolving them.
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New Critics famously rejected the biographical fallacy, treating literary texts as autonomous aesthetic objects divorced from historical context or the author's life circumstances.
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In 1954, W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley's essay The Intentional Fallacy became a cornerstone text arguing that authorial intent should be excluded from New Criticism literary interpretation.
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Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren's 1938 textbook Understanding Poetry revolutionized secondary education by introducing New Criticism's close reading methodology to American classrooms nationwide.
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The New Criticism Movement flourished between 1930 and 1960, with I.A. Richards and William Empson establishing foundational principles through close textual analysis practices.