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Praising It New: The Best of the New Criticism

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Appearances to the contrary, this awkwardly titled collection is no exercise in cultural nostalgia. True, since the mid-1970s the New Criticism has not dominated professional study of Anglo-American literature, but its discourse still influences our habits of analysis and interpretation. Whether to explain creativity, comprehensive world-pictures, or hidden patterns of meaning, the New Critical mindset meticulously searches out, foregrounds, and clarifies the dense, resonant, and potentially unifying relation of poetic part to whole. Choice of theories and methods is discretionary. Along with the Chicago school, its equally painstaking but less versatile rival, the New Criticism anticipated several aspects of structuralist system-building and indirectly provoked the deconstructionist fixation on universal slipperiness of language and its "necessary" derivatives: instability, undecidability, and self-subversion of text. Given our long-term inattention to the New Criticism as a viewpoint, an attitude, and an historical phenomenon, Garrick Davis's anthology will serve as a partial corrective. In the pages following William Logan's fanfare (originally published in the Spring 2008 Virginia Quarterly Review), Davis provides an intelligently contextualized, if all-American, canon. One caveat: though his theoretical and programmatic selections are consistently significant, many readers will be disconcerted that Davis allotted only 24 of 300 pages to the New Criticism's most powerful and durable achievement, the close reading of specific works.