The New Criticism’s fetishization of language confined its formal insights to ethical, ahistorical terms

Evidence

For it is clear that the judgments of the New Criticism, whether they isolate examples of stylistic failure as in Crashaw or Shelley or early Yeats, or moments of stylistic density as in Dante or the Elizabethans, involve a meditation on a relationship between form and content of the kind described here. Indeed, we have already shown that the perceptions of the New Critics were differential in a dialectical sense—in that they never forgot Donne while reading Swinburne, nor indeed while reading Hardy or T. S. Eliot either—and that, implicitly or explicitly, they projected the kinds of diachronic sequences described above. Yet by eternalizing their “touchstones”—Dante, late Shakespeare, Donne—and by fetishizing language and making of it the source of a kind of ahistorical plenitude, they were able to contain their discussion of the logic of content within purely ethical limits, without being obliged to translate those ethical categories themselves into social and historical terms. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 676

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to Jameson’s Frankfurt-School project of showing how formalism (here New Criticism) needs to be transcended toward dialectical content-analysis — parallels Adorno’s critique of aesthetic formalism. — connects to: Purely immanent criticism, dominant since New Criticism, is an illusion. — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 1429

Broader Connections

• Purely immanent criticism, dominant since New Criticism, is an illusion. #expands (0.85) — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 1429