New Criticism’s rise and fall tracked McCarthy-era anti-communism

Evidence

‘New Criticism’ reached its greatest power in the late 1940s, as the USA launched the Cold War and entered the period of McCarthyism, and that its definitive decline from hegemony began in the late 1950s as McCarthyism, in the strict sense, also receded and the Eisenhower doctrine began to give way to those more contradictory trends which eventually flowered during the Kennedy era – those 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 other kinds of distancing and reifications required by the larger culture. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 86 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

After World War II, as the USA consolidated its position as the leading capitalist power in the world, so immense was the right-wing national consensus, so pathological the anti-communist phobia, that those lonely figures, such as Kenneth Burke, who continued to do serious radical work in literary and cultural theory were thoroughly marginalized. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 85 (#expands, via linked claim)

The cumulative weight of this cultural configuration has been such that when ‘New Criticism’ appeared on the horizon – with its fetishistic notions of the utter autonomy of each single literary work, and its post-Romantic idea of ‘Literature’ as a special kind of language which yields a special kind of knowledge – its practice of reified reading proved altogether hegemonic in American literary studies for a quarter-century or more, and it proved extremely useful as a pedagogical tool in the American classroom precisely because it required of the student little knowledge of anything not strictly ‘literary’ – no history which was not predominantly literary history, no science of the social, no philosophy – except the procedures and precepts of literary formalism, which, too, it could not entirely accept in full objectivist rigour thanks to its prior commitment to squeezing a particular ideological meaning out of each literary text. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 86 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: New Criticism rose and fell in lockstep with McCarthyism — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 86; American intellectuals feared anticommunism itself more than communism in the early Cold War — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 433; American anti-communism resurged in the late 1930s, echoing Weimar’s last years. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1058 (+9 more)

Related

• New Criticism’s hegemony tracked the Cold War and McCarthyism’s rise and fall (similarity 0.92)
• New Criticism rose and fell in lockstep with McCarthyism (similarity 0.90)
• New Criticism’s classroom utility explains its hegemonic dominance (similarity 0.82)
• Postwar anti-communist consensus marginalized radical American literary theorists (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• New Criticism rose and fell in lockstep with McCarthyism #corroborates (0.95) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 86
• Postwar anti-communist consensus marginalized radical American literary theorists #expands (0.78) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 85
• American intellectuals feared anticommunism itself more than communism in the early Cold War #expands (0.75) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 433
• New Criticism’s classroom utility explains its hegemonic dominance #qualifies (0.75) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 86
• Deconstruction and structuralism, not Western Marxism, formed the theoretical ground of 1980s American criticism #responds-to (0.72) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 239
• 1960s topical folk songs would have been blacklisted during the McCarthy era #exemplifies (0.72) — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 662
• The attention industries first defeated official government propaganda via Murrow’s McCarthy expose #exemplifies (0.72) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 446
• Television’s visual medium made McCarthy look monstrous compared to Murrow’s calm presence #exemplifies (0.72) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 445
• Dylan wrote anti-McCarthy satire while under actual FBI surveillance #exemplifies (0.72) — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 364
• American anti-communism resurged in the late 1930s, echoing Weimar’s last years. #qualifies (0.70) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1058
• Islamophobic warriors function like McCarthy as useful tools of empire #expands (0.70)