New Criticism rose and fell in lockstep with McCarthyism

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

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The parallel alignment of a literary method’s political career with the Cold War’s rise and fall — and the claim that formalist close reading functioned as the ‘objective correlative’ of cultural reification — is a paradigm-shifting correlation.
• SEED: An essay on how interpretive methods in academia track geopolitical shifts — the literary methodology as a mirror of national political consolidation.
• XREF: connects to: Purely immanent criticism, dominant since New Criticism, is an illusion. — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 1429; McCarthy’s distinctiveness was tactical, not strategic — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1670; New Criticism’s rise and fall tracked McCarthy-era anti-communism (+1 more)

Related

• New Criticism’s hegemony tracked the Cold War and McCarthyism’s rise and fall (similarity 0.94)
• New Criticism’s rise and fall tracked McCarthy-era anti-communism (similarity 0.90)
• New Criticism’s classroom utility explains its hegemonic dominance (similarity 0.85)