Post-new criticism

Abstract

There is, at the time of this writing, no single successor to the New Criticism that dominates teaching and writing as that school did in its heyday; the most accurate assessment would be that gender studies, New Historical readings, and other methodologies based in politics and economics have dominance in the academy over such philosophical schools as phenomenology and deconstruction. For that reason, much post-New Critical writing is concerned with definition, articulation of principles, and jockeying for position within the learned hierarchy. Thus some of the best recent books elaborate method at the expense of individual texts (or at least of The Portrait of a Lady). The matter is further complicated by the fact that the newer methodologies, especially those that, like deconstruction and reader-response, are predicated on a text’s ultimate meaninglessness, sometimes tend to mingle and overlap in a single essay. When a central religion falters, competing and (eventually) cross-pollinating cults will try to take its place, and as the New Criticism wanes, critical methods will invariably interbreed. In the interest of clarity, what follows is an attempt to identify some of the prominent post-New Critical schools and their contributions to our understanding of The Portrait of a Lady.