My own approach to literature and literary criticism is strongly informed by the example of New Criticism, although substituting for the New Critics' tendency to treat the text as object an emphasis on aesthetic experience, inspired by John Dewey's Art as Experience. The New Critics' insistence that the proper focus of literary study was on literature, not politics or sociology, that reading requires paying close attention to the organization of language, and that whatever "meaning" a text conveys is necessarily conditioned by its formal organization have always seemed to me not just convincing but finally so manifestly obvious I can't really accept the judgment implicitly rendered by the practice of academic criticism that the underlying assumptions of New Criticism are inextricably tied to a historical phase of literary criticism that was appropriately superseded by the new assumptions of subsequent phases.
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