New Criticism and theory

At the beginning of his book on Deconstruction , Jonathan Culler notes that critical theory, seen “as an attempt to establish the validity or invalidity of particular interpretive procedures,” is profoundly indebted to New Criticism: This movement “not only instilled the assumption that the purpose of literary study is the interpretation of literary works but also implied by its most memorable theoretical project – the effort to define and combat the intentional fallacy – that literary theory is the attempt to eliminate methodological errors to set interpretation on its proper course.” Other factors enter into the development of theory, of course, but New Criticism is one of the streams that feeds what is now known as theory.

Ironic to consider what those staid, conservative close readers unleashed.