On the Development of Literary Criticism in America after World War I

摘要

In the United States such critics as John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks agreed with Eliot that literary criticism should be a largely autonomous endeavor, distinct from biography, psychology, philosophy, and other disciplines. Brooks described this critical approach as "formalist" because it was centered on a close reading and an analysis of the elements - metaphor, imagery, symbolism, and so forth - of a poem or other piece of literature and not on its cultural context. The emphasis of this approach was well tailored to the complexity of Modernist literature, particularly poetry, which seemed to require literary critics to explain the work to the reader.