New Criticism’s hegemony tracked the Cold War and McCarthyism’s rise and fall

Evidence

What is even more significant, however, is that ‘New Criticism’ reached its greatest power in the late·l940s, as the USA launched the Cold War and entered the period of McCarthyism, and char irs definitive decline from hegemony began in the late 1950s as McCarthyism, in the strict sense, also receded and rhe Eisenhower doctrine began to give way to those more contradictory trends which eventually flowered during the Kennedy erathose golden years of US liberalism which gave us the Vietnam War. The peculiar blend of formalist detachment and deliberate distancing from forms of the prose narrative, with their inescapable locations in social life, into reified readings of short lyrics was, so to speak, the objective correlative of ocher kinds of distancing and reifications required by the larger culture. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 223

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the Ahmad-materialist-critique thread: aesthetic formalism rises and falls in lockstep with political repression, evidence that literary method is itself materially conditioned rather than discourse-autonomous. — connects to: New Criticism’s rise and fall tracked McCarthy-era anti-communism; New Criticism rose and fell in lockstep with McCarthyism — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 86; New Criticism’s classroom utility explains its hegemonic dominance — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 86
• SEED: Potential essay angle: periodizing ‘apolitical’ aesthetic methods against political repression cycles — as New Criticism tracked McCarthyism, what formalisms track our own policed eras?
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that formalist distance is the ‘objective correlative’ of the larger culture’s required reifications is a dense, counterintuitive inversion of the common view — that formalism is a refuge from politics becomes a claim that it is politics by other means.

Broader Connections

• New Criticism’s rise and fall tracked McCarthy-era anti-communism #corroborates (0.98)
• New Criticism rose and fell in lockstep with McCarthyism #corroborates (0.97) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 86
• New Criticism’s classroom utility explains its hegemonic dominance #expands (0.75) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 86