Old and New Formalisms

Abstract

The history of Anglo-American New Criticism has been recounted a number of times, and there is no need to recapitulate it in detail here, but a brief sketch may be useful since most contemporary formalisms do not simply abandon New Criticism but attempt to revise and reconstitute certain aspects of it. As John Mclntyre and Miranda Hickman note, “today’s reinvigorated forms of close and surface reading can valuably be informed by — in fact, need the support of — historically based réévaluations of the New Criticism.”¹ We can start with a lightning prehistory. If the idea of the poem as an objective structure displaying a complex rather than simple unity is one concept at the heart of New Critical theory and practice, then it would be possible to begin a genealogy of the movement with Aristotle. As W. K. Wimsatt has remarked,

The kind of oneness implied not only in Aristotle’s general theory of organic form but in his theory of verbal mimesis is the oneness of a thing which has heterogeneous, interacting parts He sees the whole as more than the sum of its parts if only in that it includes the relations among the parts.²