New Criticism: Novelties and Limitations

The New Criticism theory has come as a reaction against traditional ways of approaching literary texts. All the approaches that preceded it like the historical, the biographical, and the psychological approaches, mainly, and which relied heavily on extra-textual elements to unfold or disentangle a piece of art, were judged to be biased and lacking, for the simple reason that they make the critic and the reader, alike, stray from the text on the page, and indulge in fields that are beyond the text. For the New Critics, the text should remain an autonomous, auto-referential, highly autotelic, and a hermetically closed entity that derives its meaning, if there is any meaning at all, from the interactions of its internal parts. It should reflect but itself by its free play of signifiers, relying on devices that create ambiguity and tensions to be resolved within the confines of the text itself.