A mode of literary analysis that developed in the southern US in the 1930s and 1940s and became the dominant way of reading and thinking about literature in the American academy until the advent of structuralism in the 1960s. New Criticism treats the literary work of art as a stand-alone, self-sufficient object that can only be properly appreciated in isolation. Careful attention to the specificity of language use, a process usually referred to as âclose readingâ, should tell the reader everything they need to know about a text. The New Critics regarded every text (providing it was of a sufficiently high standard to be deemed literary in the first place) as singular and ineffable, its meaning unique and incapable of being expressed by any other means. For this reason New Critics prized and all but insisted on âdifficultyâ with regard to language use (a preference which would later earn them the charge of elitism), making it an essential cornerstone in their attempt to define the âgoodâ literary object. By âdifficultyâ the New Critics essentially meant polysemy (as the structuralists would subsequently call it) or multiple meanings. Like the Russian Formalism before them, and with a similar zeal for the technical side of writing, the New Critics wanted to distinguish literature from non-literature in purely formal terms, which is to say purely on the basis of the language use. The New Critics were inspired by Richards, Ivor Armstrongâ famous experiment with Cambridge students in which he gave them poems to analyse but told them neither the title nor the author of the pieces selected and interrogated their responses, finding them wanting in both sensitivity and skill. The results of this experiment, written up in Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgement (1929), struck a chord with the New Critics who also thought that literary studies needed to be taught differently, with more rigour than it had been in the past. New Criticismâs immense influence in North America, which lasted well into the 1980s, stems from the fact that it paid serious attention to the problem of how to teach literature. In contrast to Practical Criticism, which was very much centred around F. R. Leavis in Cambridge, New Criticism had several focal points---the key names in the field were: John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, R. P. Blackmur, W. K. Wimsatt, and Monroe Beardsley. Further Reading: T. Eagleton Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983).