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Christopher Vincent
English

James Crosswhite, Mentor

The Confluence of Mimesis, History, and Intertextualism: New Criticism Re-contextualized

Since the writings of Derrida and Foucault in the 1960s, New Criticism, which had risen from the Formalism of the 1930s, was supplanted by Deconstruction and Post-structuralism. Opponents of these new critical methods argued that New Criticism completely failed to contextualize analysis and evaluation within the text itself. Critics from Plato and Aristotle to Eliot and Ransom, however, show it is clear that all formalist criticism contextualizes analysis primarily in the text and evaluation secondarily in mimesis, history and intertextualism. The study of modern neo-formalists such as Dana Gioia Timothy Steele, coupled with the aforementioned classical critics, will illustrate that formalist kinds of criticism has always been secondarily contextualized for purposes of evaluation and that modern neo-formalists make this clearer for contemporary scholars.