Literary Sphere

Here’s a detailed summary of Cleanth Brooks’s essay "The Formalist Critics" from  Literary Theory: An Anthology (Third Edition), edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan.   In his essay The Formalist Critics , Cleanth Brooks lays out and defends the critical principles of what came to be known as the New Criticism. This school of thought became the dominant mode of literary study in American universities from the 1940s through the late 1960s. Brooks, influenced by I. A. Richards and his own extensive critical practice, uses this piece to address common misunderstandings and objections to the formalist method, rather than merely restating its basic principles. At the outset, Brooks affirms some key articles of faith to which he subscribes. First, he claims that literary criticism is primarily a description and evaluation of its object — the literary work itself. Criticism, in his view, should be centrally concerned with the unity of a work: the manner in which its ...