New Criticism

New Criticism, an outgrowth of Formalism, was the dominant mode of criticism in the English-speaking world from about 1920 to 1960. It is still widely practiced at an undergraduate level today.

New Criticism focuses on features of the text to the total exclusion of authorial intention or socioeconomic influence. Ambiguity is a major criterion for evaluation; close reading is the main method.

For the GRE Literature exam, associate the following terms and people with New Criticism:

-intentional fallacy, affective fallacy, the heresy of paraphrase, close reading
-T.S. Eliot, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, I.A. Richards, John Crowe Ransom, F.R. Leavis

For more information, I recommend Culler's Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction.