NEW CRITICISM (Formalism)
Alright, back to descriptions of schools of criticism. For this entry, I’ll talk about Reader Response Theory’s direct opposite: New Criticism.
In the middle of the 20th Century the various schools of Formalism had a massive battle royal, winner take all. A faction known as “The New Critics” came in and dominated American literary criticism for decades. The New Critics took their name from a book, The New Criticism, published in 1941 by one of their members, John Crowe Ransom. They were also influenced by the critical essays of T. S. Eliot, with such snappy titles as “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and “Hamlet and His Problems.”