A number of my college teachers were very much influenced by the New Critics, and so, to some extent, was I. Close reading is great when done by someone who has the knowledge and skill to do it. But the Ph.D. machines have turned out a lot of second-rate readers and literary scholarship is as subject to Gresham's Law as the marketplace.
The problem I saw is that the New Criticism could degenerate into a pound of theory for an ounce of reading. Then some of their students became rock critics and applied to Dylan and the Doors the tools of analysis developed for reading Donne or Eliot. The results were unfortunate.
ReplyDelete(Of course, the deconstructionist critics of pop music have been no better.)