NEW CRITICISM
New Criticism (nowa krytyka) - brytyjsko-amerykańska szkoła teoretycznoliteracka, zwana także formalizmem amerykańskim, powstała w latach 40. XX wieku, inspirowana działalnością krytycznoliteracką T. S. Eliota, a także Ezry Pounda. Charakteryzuje ją postawa antyintencjonalna (krytyk nie powinien przy badaniu dzieła literackiego zajmować się intencjami, które przyświecały jego autorowi) oraz ergocentryczna (skupienie się na samym dziele, "czyste badanie"). Według założeń tej szkoły dzieło literackie zbudowane jest z rdzenia (decydującego o jego wewnętrznej spójności) i szczegółów (logicznej zawartości dzieła, jego treści), czyli inaczej ze struktury i tekstury. Celem badań Nowych Krytyków miało być badanie i analizowanie tekstury, jako elementu indywidualnego dla każdego dzieła.

Najwybitniejsi przedstawiciele New Criticism to m.in. John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks.

New Criticism is a type of formalist current of literary theory that dominated Anglo-American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object.

New Criticism developed in the 1920s-30s and peaked in the 1940s-50s. The movement is named after John Crowe Ransom's 1941 book The New Criticism. New Critics treat a work of literature as if it were self-contained. They do not consider the reader's response, author's intention, or historical and cultural contexts. New Critics perform a close reading of the text, and believe the structure and meaning of the text should not be examined separately. New Critics especially appreciate the use of literary devices in a text. The New Criticism has sometimes been called an objective approach to literature.
The notion of ambiguity is an important concept within New Criticism; several prominent New Critics have been enamored above all else with the way that a text can display multiple simultaneous meanings. In the 1930s, I. A. Richards borrowed Sigmund Freud's term "overdetermination" (which Louis Althusser would later revive in Marxist political theory) to refer to the multiple meanings which he believed were always simultaneously present in language. To Richards, claiming that a work has "One And Only One True Meaning" is an act of superstition (The Philosophy of Rhetoric, 39).

The Southern Agrarians, for instance, enfolded New Criticism's emphasis on irony into their anti-authoritarianism and criticism of the emerging culture of spending, consumption, and progress but — in the view of such writers as Robert Penn Warren — authoritarian populism early in the 20th century. Perhaps because of its usefulness as an unassuming but concise tool of political critique, New Criticism persisted through the Cold War years and immanent reading or close reading is now a fundamental tool of literary criticism, even underpinning poststructuralism with its associated radical criticisms of political culture. New Critical reading places great emphasis on the particular over the general, paying close attention to individual words, syntax, and the order in which sentences and ideas unfold as they are read. They look at, for example, imagery, metaphor, rhythm, meter, etc.

Practical criticism, in the general sense, the kind of criticism that analyses specific literary works, either as a deliberate application of a previously elaborated theory or as a supposedly non-theoretical investigation. More specifically, the term is applied to an academic procedure devised by the critic I. A. Richards at Cambridge University in the 1920s and illustrated in his book Practical Criticism (1929). In this exercise, students are asked to analyse a short poem without any information about its authorship, date, or circumstances of composition, thus forcing them to attend to the ‘words on the page’ rather than refer to biographical and historical contexts. This discipline, enthusiastically adopted by the Cambridge school, became a standard model of rigorous criticism in British universities, and its style of ‘close reading’ influenced the New Criticism in America. See also explication.

Close reading describes, in literary criticism, the careful, sustained interpretation of a brief passage of text. Such a reading places great emphasis on the particular over the general, paying close attention to individual words, syntax, and the order in which sentences and ideas unfold as they are read.

The technique as practiced today was pioneered (at least in English) by I.A. Richards and his student William Empson, later developed further by the New Critics of the mid-twentieth century. It is now a fundamental method of modern criticism. Close reading is sometimes called explication de texte, which is the name for the similar tradition of textual interpretation in French literary study, a technique whose chief proponent was Gustave Lanson.

Seven Types of Ambiguity was first published in 1930 by William Empson. It was one of the most influential critical works of the 20th century and was a key foundation work in the formation of the New Criticism school.[1] The book is organized around seven types of ambiguity that Empson finds in the poetry he criticises. The first printing in America was by New Directions in 1947.

Seven Types of Ambiguity ushered in New Criticism in the United States. The book is a guide to a style of literary criticism practiced by Empson. An ambiguity is represented as a puzzle to Empson. We have ambiguity when "alternative views might be taken without sheer misreading." Empson reads poetry as an exploration of conflicts within the author.