Does anyone still read this stuff?
From New To Outmoded
New Criticism fell out of favor in the 1960s and '70s, as other theories stepped up to the lit crit plate. Sure, many of these theories would use the same analytic tools as New Criticism, but to different ends. Just like many other thinkers of the '60s and '70s, literary theorists in those days were lookin' to shake up the existing social order.
So, feminist and new historical readings both wanted, once again, to widen the scope beyond the text. But this time, they wanted to incorporate more cultural context and information about society's changes over time into their analyses as a way of raising questions like: Hey, why does Western culture worship the phallus? Or, Why is the literary canon so dominated by white people?
You catch our drift.
There was also this other new movement, known as Reader-Response Theory, that put an analytic emphasis on readers. This group of scholars believed the key to a text's meaning lay in how different readers reacted to it. Because, unlike the New Critics—who thought that a text had inherent meaning, which could be uncovered through close reading—Reader-Response Theorists believed the text had no inherent meaning.
A work's central themes, they thought, were really created in the dynamic interactions between the text and readers' subjective interpretations of that text.
Heavy.
Now, even though just about all of these new theories used close reading to examine texts, they were all aiming at something bigger than literature. Their focus was broader. Post-New Criticism scholars wanted focus on the text and its context in order to see how each little work fit into a whole cultural network of people and philosophies.
(Deconstruction opened a different can of worms altogether. That movement was all about destabilizing norms, and playing with readers' expectations of literature. These guys weren't as interested in uncovering texts' meanings as they were in proving that meaning itself was uncertain. But that's another story…)
Retrofit New Crit—As Fashionable As Peg Leg Pants
So some other theories became more popular than New Criticism in the '60s and '70s. That doesn't mean New Crit ever got shelved entirely. We still use a lot of the tools developed by the New Critics when we consider literary works today.
Close reading is sort of like the Swiss army knife of literary theory. No matter what you analyze, young Shmoopers—a text in isolation, or a text in relation to the history of women's writing, or a text in relation to readers' interpretations of it—you're going to be working with the text's language and form.
Plus, some critics are still writing about the way this movement has forever changed the way we read texts. To this end, a couple of books have come out that have tried to give New Critics their dues, including The New Criticism and Contemporary Literary Theory (1995) and Praising it New: The Best of the New Criticism (2008).
A "new" New Criticism, known as New Formalism, also emerged in the early 2000s. And you know that any time a movement enjoys a renaissance, that's because there was something great about it to begin with. Like, if pink is the new black, we know that little black dresses have always been pretty rad.
New Formalism has gained some academic ground with today's professors, including Marjorie Levinson. In her 2007 article, "What is New Formalism?", Levinson surveyed this field and noted that all of its different brands "seek to reinstate close reading both at the circular center of our discipline and as the opening move."
That is, the New Formalists (much like the New Critics, actually) don't want to ban history or culture from literary analysis. They just want to analyze the text first, before taking a critical stance on it. After that, everything's fair game.